ABC figures for December show a significant improvement in the declining sales of Sunday newspaper titles, even as weekday circulation struggled.
In December, the overall circulation of Sunday newspapers fell by 0.6% month on month and 11.2% year on year. This was almost half the rate of decline month on month in November, and is a significantly lower rate year on year.
The Sunday Mirror, Sunday Post and Sunday Mail all increased their sales from November to December in small amounts, but the Daily Star Sunday edition achieved impressive 3.1% growth. All of these titles, along with the Mail on Sunday, achieved lower-than-average declines year on year.
The ABC is the Audit Bureau of Circulations. It’s an independent, industry-owned auditor of the UK media industry which regularly publishes data on newspaper circulation figures.
Reach group circulation director John Howard said December had been a “decent month” for Reach titles. “It’s always a difficult month to predict in terms of sales due to the huge disruption to trading patterns. We should say a huge thank you to all retailers over this period, especially those who turned out on Boxing Day, and, of course, to all those news deliverers.”
Saturday newspaper titles continued to have the lowest rate of decline year on year, but dropped more than twice as much as in the previous month. Publishers excluded most Christmas-to-new-year editions from their figures.
The results follow a difficult period for the sector. Figures for September showed Saturday circulation falling by 1.9% and Sunday circulation by 2% month on month when compared to August. Those figures represented a substantial increase on the rate of decline relative to the previous month. The month on month decline figures for August compared to July being 0.3% on Saturday, 1% on Sundays, and 0.7% on weekdays.
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