ABCs: Weekend nationals grow circulation as metro weekly newspapers continue to decline
The weekend national papers saw their circulations bounce in three months ending in December 2016 compared with the July to September period directly before.
According to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, Fairfax Media’s Australian Financial Review weekend edition reported a circulation of 56,141 up 12.50% on the period directly before, while Weekend Australian grew by 0.4% to 221,930.
While there was growth, looking at the year-on-year figures both newspapers were down with the AFR weekend edition down 4.10%, year-on-year, and the Weekend Australian down 1.20%.
It seems that Australia’s daily newspapers are still very popular from at least one viewpoint. Take the Sydney Morning Herald for instance. With its latest weekday audited circulation of 93,403 (down 10% on last year) and latest average issue readership of 655,000 according to EMMA, that’s fully 7 readers per copy on average! Amazing! Even the Morgan survey credits the paper with 5 readers per copy. Why don’t more of these ardent pass-on readers buy their own copies? I mean, the paper must be quite a shambles by the time the 7th reader gets it. More to the point, why don’t the research companies release their source-of-copy data so that we can all make sense of these numbers?
PW, buddy! Emma stats don’t care if you actually read the paper. As long as you glanced the Hyundai Elantra wrap around then you are part of the readership.
Emma is like; if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If you simply walk past a free newspaper at an airport departure gate then you are readership. It’s quite clever, quite zen at the same time.
Over a week, you should count the times you see or thinks about a newspaper masthead compared to articles you actually read in a paper.
You’re welcome
If newspapers took their watchdog role seriously they would still be relevant but journalism has become a farce of their own making. I couldn’t even be bothered reading the copies at McDonalds.