UK Newspaper Readership 2013_Q3

Here’s a very quick look at the latest NRS survey in the UK released yesterday. Readership of the print edition combined with comscore data on their respective websites gives a PAAD – Print And Digital Data or a news title’s ‘brand footprint’ –their total readership across print and electronic media.

In terms of print readership, The Sun is by far the best read paper in the UK at 6.1m readers every day, nearly 1.5m readers ahead of its closest rival the Daily Mail. The best read paper in the UK reaches 12% of the population whereas here the best read paper, the Sunday independent, reaches 26%. That’s says more about the proliferation of national and local media available in the UK than it does on the might of the Sunday Independent.

Across the board, in comparison to the previous quarter, all papers have dropped print readership, with the tabloids suffering the most. Most papers are down around 2% but the redtops are looking at around 5% declines. This is not helped by the fact that they, tabloid readers, are not abandoning print for the web – they are simply abandoning their titles.

The Mail dominates the web readership with 2m plus online readers ever day. This is followed by the Guardian at just over 1m daily but its web traffic is down, considerably in comparison to other papers, on the previous quarter.

The Sun’s online readership fell dramatically (75%) explained by the fact that they went behind a paywall in August. The net beneficiary of that was The Daily Star whose web visits grew by nearly 150% (on a low base). Strangely, The Mirror online doesn’t seem to have gained at all by the Sun’s paywall decision.

Finally, it’s interesting to see what extension a title gets when on and offline are combined. The Guardian gets by far the biggest increase, growing its footprint by 110% when web readership is taken into account. On the reverse, the Sun, and tabloids in general, don’t get a huge lift through online