UK Newspaper Readership 2013

The NRS, the UK equivalent to the JNRS here, was released on the 23^rd August. The survey is similar to our own (now) in that it takes account of readership of a paper in both print and online. It also makes for interesting data.

Looking to the future of news organisations first:  We see that the most visited news website in the survey is the Daily Mail reaching 2,110,000 UK citizens (subjects) every day (the survey data is limited to the UK only)

This is followed by the Guardian at 1,391,000 visitors a day and then the Telegraph at 815,000 visitors per day – but notably – all paying guests. The Telegraph, The Times and F.T. are all behind a paywall and all their visitors are paying for the privilege of viewing the website. The Sun is as well, but the research did not reflect this as they only began to charge in August.  

The big question is not will the Mail slip behind a paywall, but when will this happen. With 2m+ visitors, this has to give rise to formulating some strategy to capitalise financially their vast number of visitors.

But the big numbers are the ‘brand footprints’ – how far a news brand extends when both in print and web are combined. There is no hard and fast rule on this one as each brand’s combination is very different and a very different mix.

The paper with the biggest ‘footprint’ is The Sun/Sunday with a reach of just shy of 7m people every day. However its contribution from the net is one of the lowest in the survey with the web contributing only an extra 9% to its overall reach.

 And that’s a feature and a big problem for tabloids as the web begins to become the dominant medium for news brands.  Their readers are, by and large, are not tech orientated  and its probably very much down to their readership profile- scaffolders don’t carry tablets to work and don’t really have the opportunity to browse the net during working hours, to be glib about it. All the Tabloids on in the survey have made little or no inroads into capturing an audience on the web and the biggest tabloid manages only a 16% contribution from the net to its overall reach.   

The Sun has gone behind a paywall this month and its e-cert will be available mid September showing how many went over the wall with it. But its pre-August marketing campaign to entice people to follow it was based on a deal it hammered out with the Barkley’s Premier League. The USP was not the papers current content, but the fact that it was able to show instant clips of premier league goals, as they happen, to paywall subscribers.  

The other interesting feature in the data is that contribution to the overall footprint from the net and how it varies vastly between brands.

The outright leader here is the Guardian extending its reach two-and-a-half times when its web visitors are counted. It’s a great figure in that it extends it reach so far and tips over 2m ‘readers’ per day. One the other hand, and looking at the established business model for newspapers, its says that 2.5 times as many people will read you online and will  not bother to purchase you in a printed form.