Day: 3 March 2009

On the Sunday side the market is also showing a downward trend having lost 69,000 copies in the last four years and or 11% decline in total. January 2004 the market stood at 1.274m copies every Sunday, it’s now to just a shade above 1.20m copies every Sunday. 

Over the four years some titles have bucked the overall newspaper tend completely – most notably the Sunday World where circulations have grown by nearly 17,000 copies. On the other end of the scale – the Irish People circulation is down a staggering 92% to 26,847 copies every Sunday.

Surely they are near (if not at) the point where those levels of sales make it a completely uneconomical exercise. Or perhaps they are happy to “pay” for circulation with the ROI edition contributing over 4% of their over circulation.

The picture for the newspaper circulations still looks bleak. Some papers really struggled in the past twelve months and some managed to completely buck the trend, with very few titles staying in positive territory.

In volume terms the most notable loss comes from the News of the World dropping 17,345 copies every Sunday. This is followed by the Sunday Independent shaving 12,000 off its sale. Bucking the trend was The Sunday World adding 1,400 copies.

All the morning titles took a hit, with the ‘tabloids’ taking the brunt of the falls. Their share of the morning market is about 40% but the three papers accounted for over 60% of the drop.

The evening market, being the evening market, showed further declines.

Whilst the numbers look small in places, you have to take the bigger picture those declines in circulation at around 94,000 in total represent a drop of about ?28m at the till per annum.