The Latest UK National Newspaper Audit Is Little Short Of A Disaster For the Paid-Fors And Either Their Giveaways Aren’t Helping Any More Or If It Weren’t For Them Who Knows How Really Bad It Might Have Been

Philip M. Stone November 12, 2006

The Sunday Times raised its price to £2 and lost 37,376 subscribers (2.32%) over September although the accountants can make the case they’re still doing better from the price hike. The Evening Standard raised its price by 10p to fight two free newspapers, and it lost 2.54% on the month and is down a whopping 14.38% on the year. And the Daily Express having returned to normal price after a 10p reduction for several months now finds itself worse off than ever.

The free newspapers, however, continue to do well with Murdoch’s thelondonpaper now giving away 5,000 more copies than its arch-rival London Lite, the morning Metro is giving away 62,000 more copies daily (557,000) than it did last year, and even the one-year old CityAM financial paper saw a 2.46% increase to 92,899 as it chases that magic 100,000 figure.

The only daily newspaper to actually show an increase was the Financial Times that went up 1.79% for the month and shows a 4.9% increase for the year and although the Daily Mail dropped 2.49% on the month its figures for the year are unchanged.

So, free does very well, those who resumed normal price after months of a lower price see their circulation slip sliding away, and those that increased their prices to never-before-seen rates take falls. And all of that even though the DVD giveaways were still in full swing.

And if one jumps across the Atlantic to the New York market where, for the first time, Murdoch’s New York Post, on the back of a big cut in its newsstand price, finally sold more than the Daily News, and shake all of this together there’s a message – people, especially the younger crowd,  have become ever-more cost conscious about buying their daily newspaper and unless there’s a really big story they just won’t bother unless the price is low enough to be hardly noticeable.

Free is best, cut price is okay, but those full price customers with only a few exceptions are, as Warren Buffet said not so long ago, heading for the cemetery. 

London with 11 national newspapers, is about as competitive a market as one will find. The tabloids used to rule the roost. But it is the tabloids that are now getting slaughtered.

Murdoch’s Sun still retains the highest circulation of any daily with 3.1 million but it is falling perilously close to that psychological 3 million figure. Its circulation is now the lowest it has been in 32 years, dropping 3.4% in October and it is down 3.63% on the year. And even an 18 DVD collection promotion didn’t stop the rot.

And then there is its sister Sunday tabloid, The News of The World. Was it that many years ago that is circulation was more than 5 million? Today it is down to just 3.4 million, a drop of 8.7% from a year ago and down 1.92% in October.

Bad as that number is, The People, owned by Trinity-Mirror is in far worse shape. Its Sunday circulation is down 12.8% over the past 12 months and now languishes under 790,000. There was a time when it and the News of The World were arch circulation rivals. There were reports recently that on some Sundays The People has been hard-pressed to garner six figures worth of advertising. 

At The Sunday Times the hike by 20 pence to £2 has taken its toll with circulation down 37,736 and it is the first time in seven years that its circulation has fallen below 1.3 million. The accountants, however, will work out that on circulation revenue alone, let alone newsprint and ink savings and the like, that the paper is some £50,000 ahead by the higher price and lower circulation. It all depends really on what circulation advertisers are being promised. Did the two DVD giveaways and a British Airways miles offer stop the loss from being even more severe, or did they have little effect. That’s something the marketing department will really want to know.

At the Daily Express the experiment earlier in the year of lowering the price by 10p had worked in that it not only stopped the circulation drop but actually brought a rise up to 845,000. But since July the price has been back at 40p and the October figures now put circulation at 788,719 – down 3.69% on the month and 2.73% for the year. With that slump the paper has resorted to more severe cost cutting, duimping 10% of its 350 journalists and announcing plans that PA, the national news agency, will put together the newspaper’s business section.

One of the ploys used by the Evening Standard to fight off two new free newspapers was to raise its cover by 10 pence to 50 pence based on the “you get what you pay for philosophy”. Two months into that experiment and things are not looking good. September saw a decline of some 7,000 papers, down to 281,915, down 2.54% on the month but more seriously down 14.38% year-on-year.

And the numbers are really far worse because at full cover price, once the bulk sales are stripped out, the paper is selling around 225,000 copies daily.

On the free newspaper scene, last month it was London Lite, printed by Associated Newspapers, that had a 32,000-copy edge over Murdoch’s thelondonnpaper, but the situation reversed in October with Murdoch’s freebie now 5,000 ahead. But between them they are still giving out around 750,000 copies nightly, so perhaps when looking at the Evening Standard numbers one might think that newspaper isn’t doing too badly given the circumstances.

The morning Metro, also published by Associated, has seen its circulation grow by 60,000 since last October and is now at 557,000. Associated is said to make about £10 profit per reader per year.

And CityAM saw a 2.46% circulation rise for October bringing its daily circulation to 92,899.

Look at all those numbers and toss in the audit numbers for US papers just issued for the past six months and there is little in there to bring joy to a paid-for big metropolitan newspaper publisher on either side of the Atlantic.

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