The Estimation of Single Copy Newspaper Sales: A Tertiary Market Demand Model

Due to the volatility of demand and the corresponding high costs of production and distribution of newspapers in tertiary market areas, it would appear essential that a publisher of a local daily/Sunday newspaper have an effective means of predicting demand in these outlying market areas. This forecast would in turn enable the news company to properly adjust their marketing efforts to increase overall system efficiency and to become more cost effective in the long run. A Tertiary Market Demand Model proposed to deal with this problem utilizes a combination of forecasting methods and a modified stratified random sampling procedure in an interactive mode to produce interval forecasts in tertiary market areas on a daily basis.