Spectacular rises for digital readerships as newsprint audiences fall
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Version 0 of 1. The print versions of paid-for national newspapers saw further declines in estimated readers in the year up to March 2015, according to the latest set of National Readership Survey (NRS) figures.* But audiences at most titles enjoyed huge, and in most cases, spectacular, rises in digital readerships. The other notable feature in the statistics is the large increase in print readership for the two main free titles, the London Evening Standard - up 25% on the previous year - and Metro, up 8%. The Daily Telegraph lost 15% of its print readership in the course of the 12 months between April 2014 ans March 2015, down by 194,000, while the Times lost 14%, a decrease of 160,000. Three other dailies suffered what the NRS regards as statistically significant losses: the Daily Star (-13%); the Daily Mail (-9%) and the Sun (also -9%). Although the Independent lost 11% over the year, its sale was so low that the total readership decrease totalled only 37,000. Similarly, the Daily Express’s 11% loss amounted to just 122,000. Declines for the Guardian (-4%), Daily Mirror (-4%) and i (-3%) were more modest. Among the Sunday nationals, the stand-out readership falls were at the Sun on Sunday (-16%), Sunday Times (-15%), Daily Star Sunday (-14%), the Observer (-13%), Sunday Telegraph (-12%) and the Mail on Sunday (-6%). After the gloom, now for the positive picture portrayed by the survey of the booming audiences accessing newspaper content through their personal computers, mobile phones and tablets. When the monthly readerships for print and PCs are combined, three daily titles - Guardian, Telegraph and Independent - achieved treble digit rises of 222%, 206% and 123% respectively. There were creditable rises also for the Express (78%), the Mail (72%), the Mirror (62%) and the Star (47%). By contrast, with the Times and Sun behind paywalls, their rises were tiny, just 8% and 5% respectively. Turning to the figures that aggregate print, PC and mobile readerships, also on a monthly basis, some of the totals are eye-wateringly high and put the dismal print-only declines in perspective. The Mail, for instance, had more than 29m monthly readers while the Mirror had 22.9m. As for the daily quality titles, the Guardian had 21.6m monthly readers, just ahead of the Telegraph’s 21m total and the Independent’s 15.6m. The Times’s paywall meant that its readership was a mere 4.9m. The paywalled Sun did better, with 13.6m. As for the frees, Metro boasted a total cross-platform readership of 17.2m while the Standard managed 8.3m. Looking into the overall figures for the entire market, this new NRS survey found that 94% of British adults, some 48.6m people, read a newspaper or magazine in either print or digital form in the course of a month. Now that’s what I call market penetration. *The figures cover the period April 2014 to March 2015. The NRS is a continuous survey based on interviews with a representative sample of 35,000 adults in Britain every year. See NRS website. |