Irish Newspaper Circulations August 2011

A very interesting, if not perplexing, batch of figures. Last month was the first without the News of The World and the signs were that buyers of that paper all found new homes – temporary shelter as it turned out.

The News of the World in its last month (June) sold 113,000. The month is made no appearance the market was sown 33,000, suggesting that 80,000 had switched to another paper. It now look like that was very short lived. The Sunday Market in August was back over 50,000 copies, which is a massive month on month fall.

Could it be that the ex-NoW readers turned to other publications on the first week and then abandoned them? My own theory is that the NoW was, in the main, a secondary purchase all along which was supplemented in the first week and abandoned as a bad idea in the second.

Now most of the July beneficiaries of the closure still managed to hang on to a few copies they gained in August. But looking at this month it’s difficult to see them keeping them all. The Mirror and Star are still +8k ion the June figure, before the closure. The People up 2.5k but the Mail Sunday is below its pre closure figure by 1,500 copies.

The Morning papers were probably going through a bit of a mid-summer slump with the three tabloids taking a bit of a knock on a month on month basis and most definitely on a year on year basis.

In overall terms the market is down a staggering 137,000 year on year.