October ABC’s were released earlier and there are no real surprises. The morning tabloids took a 3% hit on the month but the Sunday tabloids had a decent month. The Mail on Sunday gained 7% or 4,000 copies on the month. The people also managed to add 7% albeit 500 copies. Beneath all the numbers is the worrying underlying trend of the year on year difference. For the past five monthly sets of figures, the
It’s a pattern that is mirrored nearly year – a boost in August and a drift back to normality in September when the gloss has gone off the first few weeks of the soccer season. The morning market was down -4% this month back from a +4% increase in September. The composition, in this analysis, of the morning market is dominated by the tabloids, the cohort most susceptible to the goings on in the Premier
August brought some much needed good news to the beleaguered newspaper market – a month on month increase in sales and the last time that occurred was August ’17. That’s actually no coincidence as August has always been kind to publishers. This August there was a bevy of large events: the two All Ireland finals took place, whereas they were normally played in September. We had the Papal visit, but I suspect that was more
The ABC’s for the first half of 2018 were released earlier today. It shows that the newspaper market had contracted by a further 7.1% over the year. The market annual rate of decline hasn’t been below -6% since 2009 and that’s a statistic that doesn’t need further commentary. The Morning market was down slightly more than the Sunday. The stark reality for the industry is that newspaper circulation has halved over the past decade alone.
July ABC arrived today. A bad month for News UK where all of their titles (bar one) made the ‘top fallers’ list. The Sun on Sunday dropped 1,900, The Sun fell 1,400 and the Sunday Times lost 1,200. Each one of those titles carry and element of ‘bulks’ but their top line figures were not effected through any adjustment of their bulks as they remained the same as last month. However, perhaps they were testing
June ABC’s the halfway point and the beginning of the Jan-June ‘Island of Ireland figures for the majority of publications audited b the ABC. Thirty-five days from now the rest of the bunch will publish their numbers. The Sun dropped over 1,000 copies month on month with the Daily Star adding 500 copies over the month. The morning market was back 1% or 1,500 over the month. You can see from the chart below the
The May ABC indicates that it wasn’t the best month for the tabloids with an accumulated drop of nearly 5,000 copies – the Daily Star taking the brunt of that fall dropping 2,200 over the month. The Sun fell by 1,700 and the Mirror lost a paltry 900 copies in relative terms. The Irish Daily Mail lost 2,000 month on month (or 6%) however its sister paper, the Mail on Sunday, added 700 copies over
April brought the tail end of the Easter Holidays which is sometimes a disruptive period for newspapers. However, it does not seem to have had an adverse effect on sales of The Sun which is showing a 3% increase month on month. Conversely, the Daily Star had a bad month dropping 2,300 copies or 5% on the month. This is marginally eclipsed by the fall in sales of the Sunday Times, which dropped 4,000 copies
Very little by way of change this month. The month was kind to the tabloids, particularly the Daily Star which saw its numbers increase by 2,000 on the month. It just shows you the attraction that the sport of kings has on its core readership – it’s no coincidence that a decent month for the paper coincides with the Cheltenham Festival. Having said that, maybe the steam is running out on that guaranteed circulation lift
The weather at the latter part of February possibly had a small adverse effect on a few of the numbers for February 2018. While the papers published (there are no exceptions in the certs) it’s impossible to know how many retail outlets the managed to get to. Interestingly the Sun and The Times were big faller’s month on month (-1770 and -2770 respectively) along with the Sunday Mirror (-2870). Conversely the Sundays had a decent
While the fingers are being pointed and denials of any wrongdoing abound concerning the Project Ireland 2040 advertising in both national and regional papers – there is one solution. There’s no need to set up a committee to investigate what happened when we already have an instrument to deal with this – the Advertising Standards Authority. They set-out, clearly, the rules governing the treatment of ‘advertorials’ in newspapers. Section 3.33 states ‘Advertorials should be clearly
We have thirteen National titles available for selection every morning and twelve to choose from every Sunday. The figures here are the circulations of national newspapers for the period of July to December 2017 and are compared to the same six months in 2016. The stark reality is that in the intervening period, the newspapers below sold ten million fewer copies per annum in comparison to the previous year. Interestingly five years ago five titles
The first audit of 2018 appeared earlier. Oddly there were a few surprises in a fairly predictable market. Month on month the Sunday Mirror managed to add 3,000 copies to its tally and the Sunday Times managed a 1,600 increase without any trickery in the bulks department. The Sun added 1,400 on the month and again maintaining the same bulk level as last month. Conversely, the Mail on Sunday ‘dropped’ 5,200 on December. This doesn’t
Trinity Mirror has announced that they have made an offer to buy The Daily Star, Daily Star Sunday, Daily Express and Sunday Express. Naturally, it’s all subject to regulatory approval, which in itself is a further hurdle. The main stay of that business is in the UK and the R.o.I. publishing concerns are a side show at best – for the main players. However for the publishing industry here it could be a game changer.
December is never a flattering month for print titles with punters getting into the yuletide spirit and having just a weather eye on the papers. Although I did note on one of the certs that the online version of The Sun recorded 4.1m visitors to the site on Christmas Day, so perhaps is just migration. One shining light this month was The Sun which was up 1,000 on the month and without any manoeuvring in
The penultimate ABC for 2017 has been released. Forecasting the outturn for the year as the exclusion of one month won’t make a huge difference at this point it looks as if the market will, again, decline between 7%/8% year on year. The titles examined here are a decent bellwether for the market as a whole, so when the full numbers are released in February for 2017 don’t be aghast at a 7% drop. In
Here’s an interesting take on the circulation numbers. The ABC certificates split out the sales of each title on a Monday to Friday basis and then single out their Saturday sales (obviously just for the mornings). In the mornings it allows you to see uplift, if any, of a titles Saturday edition and overall it allows you to see how much revenue is being generated by the title. All the revenues are what would be
December is never a flattering month for print titles with punters getting into the yuletide spirit and having just a weather eye on the papers. Although I did note on one of the certs that the online version of The Sun recorded 4.1m visitors to the site on Christmas Day, so perhaps is just migration. One shining light this month was The Sun which was up 1,000 on the month and without any manoeuvring in
October ABC’s are off the presses and show a fairly sharp drop of 1900 copies of the Daily Star over the month. The other tabloids managed to keep the drop to three figures over September. Taken together the tabloids are down 3,000 or 2% on the month. Again, we can ignore the (incredible) year on year figure for The Times given their new found interest in bulks. Month on month the morning market was
The lift seen last month, on the back of the Premier League, dissipated this month – which is a feature of the August/September dynamic. The tabloids lost to various degrees the Daily Star falling the most at 1,700 from their August figure. The Times (the Ireland edition) is some respects still flatters to deceive. Their certified figure of over 10,000 is aided and abetted in this month’s cert by no fewer than 6,000 in multiple
