ABCs: Half yearly circulation audit sees many newspapers suffer 10% declines while Sunday Telegraph falls below 400,000
News Corp’s The Sunday Telegraph’s circulation fell below 400,000 for the first time, according to the inaugural half yearly figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation.
The data is the first time that the AMAA has consolidated six months worth of circulation numbers for newspapers, rather than the previous quarterly release. The percentage changes calculated by Mumbrella represent the changes from the quarterly numbers a year ago to the new six month numbers.
Compared to the same period last year the Sydney paper’s circulation fell 8.4% from 410,137 to 378,449. However the Sunday Telegraph’s fall was far from the greatest as other publications saw declines of over 10%.
The nationals might be the first to die at this rate. Their print runs in some states cannot be economic and the distribution costs appalling. News probably has the advantage over fairfax in that its metro titles in Capital cities except Perth might subsidise the Oz costs. But it would a close run thing.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse for newspapers……those are enormous YoY drops (and come after many previous years of decline). At this rate, hard to see how most of them will be around in five years’ time.
That all might be true in time and the tipping point might be 1-20 years but if you had to sell car tyres and canned soup tomorrow and you think you’re clever with a programmatic buy that serves ads on dating sites as a cheap proxy because your target visited taste.com.au once, you don’t deserve your pay this week.
Ah Newspapers, now the only medium that gets judged on how many copies they sell, along with eyeballs.
Drop the circulation measurement and put them on an even playing field with every other medium out there who trade on an audience, or my favorite term “opportunity to see”.
Pssst. That’s actually called “Likelihood To See” (LTS).
@Anon — even on that basis (audience/readership as opposed to sales), newspapers aren’t in great shape vs other media, most notably TV. For print, readership numbers are also falling and have been for years. For digital versions of the newspapers -=- yes much higher numbers in absolute terms, but incredibly low engagement. The majority of visitors to digital news sites, spend literally a few minutes per session, or less than an hour a month on those sites. (not just here in Australia. This is a global phenomenon)
@Anon – no other media requires you to buy a copy prior to reading the ads. You don’t need to buy a TV each time you watch a new show. The number of copies they sell is a very relevant consideration.
@ChrisWalton – it is indeed a very relevant consideration, but I think to take up Anon’s point, it means your not comparing apples with oranges. There has to be some weighting given to the fact that an advertisement seen in a paper has been served to a pair of eyeballs that was willing to shill out a few of their hard earned and pay for it.
When I do see a newspaper, usually waiting for a meeting, there don’t seem to be any ads in them at all these days.
Few other things at play here
Yield per sale for instance
If you look at Fairfax or News circulation revenue it’s actually been going up for a couple of years now as they keep stress testing the high water mark of what their readers will tolerate. How much was the saturday SMH 3-4 years ago? I think only $1.20. Today , if memory serves $3.50. Ouch. So the powers that be are trading circ off for yield and probably attempting to hold ad rates. TV has pulled off this trick in stunning fashion . Their viewers drop each year but the price of ads always goes up. So I guess you can’t blame the newspaper people for giving this strategy a whirl. So how much drop is due to price increase vs newspaper readers leaving in droves for digital as is often the commentary. No idea. But I do love that TV gets off Scott free on losing viewers but newspapers are tagged as the big losers. Not sure why.
One other point.
The Fairfax person in this article is quoted as starting to sound a lot like those magazine numpties who think going dark on sales figures is a good thing, only improved by the complete pilava line that a printed masthead readership can some how be mashed with its digital engagement to come up with a much bigger figure. No one – clients, media buyers, my pet silkie chickens are that dumb. The magazine bosses have damaged their medium beyond what anyone could have imagined by trying to run this line along with obscuring sales and using often dodgy measurements of readership.print engagement is not digital engagement. You can’t mix them by saying it’s the same brand. But magazine people were always a bit cowboy like. If the newspaper bosses choose to follow them in these two strategies then that will likely mark the actual start to the final countdown on the medium Because if management resorts to these sort of stupid and desperate tactics there is truly no hope for newspapers.
The article has overstated the declines because the % calculation is wrong. For example, The Sunday Age has declined 13,422 copies (from 128,478 in 2016 to 115,056 in 2017) which is a 10.45% decline and not 11.70% decline as stated.
Still not a pretty picture for the industry though.
I picked up on that too Andrew (they’ve actually quoted how much more last year’s was compared to this year’s and called it something else). For a long time I’ve taken little notice of journalists using percentages or trying their hands at any arithmetical. They need to know how to write in a way we understand. Leave the other stuff to people with those skills.
As a little teaser, if circulation keep falling by 10% YOY they’ll never get to zero