What a difference a month can make and I’d particularly focus on the tabloid section of the Morning market in that statement. September was a good (enough) month for the tabloids especially as the hurlers took two bites of the apple. The Daily Star used those events to do a bit of price promotion and managed to maintain its numbers in September.
However, October has been a disaster for the Red Tops: The Sun fell 4% to 68,696 – the paper never having been in the 60’s – and the Daily Star stayed this side of it by only 451 copies after dropping nearly 3,000 in the month. Maybe continuing the price promotion would have helped.
Overall the tabloid market fell nearly 5,500 in the month and is down 18,000 on the year. If you were having a pint with Paddy Power, you’d have to enquire as to the odds of all the tabloids being sub seventy thousand in November. Short odds I’d wager.
Elsewhere, there were only a few minor changes. The Mail and the Mail on Sunday fell back around 1,500 each. The Sunday Times added a healthy 1,772 and, outside that there was very little to report.
To get a complete view of the Irish newspaper market we have to wait until all the nationals produce their figures. In some cases we will find out ‘yesterdays’ sale in February 2013 and it’s a six month average at that.
But we get a lot of data on a monthly basis, albeit ‘incomplete’, but robust enough to begin to paint a picture of the overall market.
If we use data stretching back to 2006 for morning and Sundays, and manipulate the data somewhat for our convenience, we’re able to see how confident we are in assessing the overall market using jsut the monthly data. Firstly we have to turn the monthly data into six month parcels for comparative purposes and then see how the monthly compares to the six monthly.
The figures are quiet encouraging: Actually there’s a very healthy 0.98 correlation between the monthly and six monthly data in the mornings and a 0.94 correlation with the Sundays.
So, if over a few months we see the monthly data tanking, you can be assured that when we do get our hands on the sis monthly data – the story will be very much the same.
| Title | Oct-12 | Oct-11 | Sep | YoY | MoM |
| Daily Mirror | 57,191 | 56,739 | 57,234 | 452 | -43 |
| Daily Record | 510 | 545 | 599 | -35 | -89 |
| Irish Daily Star | 70,450 | 80,179 | 73,387 | -9,729 | -2,937 |
| The Sun | 68,696 | 77,301 | 71,201 | -8,605 | -2,505 |
| 196,847 | 214,764 | 202,421 | -17,917 | -5,574 | |
| Daily Express | 2,648 | 3,056 | 2,898 | -408 | -250 |
| Irish Daily Mail | 50,039 | 48,896 | 51,466 | 1,143 | -1,427 |
| The Daily Telegraph | 2,789 | 2,905 | 2,926 | -116 | -137 |
| Financial Times | 3,057 | 3,688 | 2,890 | -631 | 167 |
| The Guardian | 3,152 | 3,611 | 3,245 | -459 | -93 |
| i | 777 | 504 | 767 | 273 | 10 |
| The Independent | 0 | 933 | 0 | -933 | 0 |
| The Times | 2,115 | 2,171 | 2,226 | -56 | -111 |
| Morning Market | 261,424 | 280,528 | 268,839 | -19,104 | -7,415 |
| Daily Star – Sunday | 24,168 | 39,122 | 23,607 | -14,954 | 561 |
| News of the World | 66,762 | 66,998 | 66,762 | -236 | |
| Sunday Mail | 1,029 | 1,385 | 1,320 | -356 | -291 |
| Sunday Mirror | 41,229 | 64,761 | 41,173 | -23,532 | 56 |
| The People | 18,049 | 29,586 | 17,802 | -11,537 | 247 |
| Sunday Express | 3,640 | 4,537 | 3,700 | -897 | -60 |
| Sunday Post | 654 | 755 | 660 | -101 | -6 |
| The Mail on Sunday | 108,791 | 110,387 | 110,475 | -1,596 | -1,684 |
| Independent on Sunday | 0 | 1,437 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| The Observer | 6,370 | 7,281 | 6,265 | -911 | 105 |
| The Sunday Telegraph | 2,857 | 2,803 | 2,788 | 54 | 69 |
| The Sunday Times | 102,447 | 111,618 | 100,675 | -9,171 | 1,772 |
| Sunday Market | 375,996 | 373,672 | 375,463 | 2,324 | 533 |
| Racing Post | 5,340 | 5,662 | 5,144 | -322 | 196 |
| Total Market | 642,760 | 659,862 | 649,446 | -17,102 | -6,686 |
And the so what….? Well, when the last six monthly ABC was published it allowed us to say, with certainty, that the Morning Market was 531,000 copies each morning. Given that the monthly portion of this data shows the morning market standing at 261,000, then I’d say that it’s a racing certainty (Paddy Power having bought me another) that next month the overall morning market will have fallen below 500,000. However we won’t have evidence of this until February of next year when all the numbers are revealed. By then the alarm bells should be ringing – someone should be reacting.
