ABC National Newspaper Round-Up: March 2013

The latest ABC National Newspaper figures for March show that, despite the continued year on year declines in print sales, the daily titles experienced a month of growth for around half of titles, and only slight declines elsewhere.

The ‘i’ and the Financial Times saw the greatest period increase in circulation, both up 1.5%. Overall, the entire market was only down -0.1% for the period.

The ‘i’ also saw a healthy year on year (YoY) increase of 10.6%, and alongside the Times, was the only paper to celebrate both YoY and PoP increases. Every title in the quality market was up in March.

In the mid market the Daily Express was down -0.5% PoP and down 32,409 over the year (-5.8%), whilst the Daily Mail suffered a PoP decline of -0.4, down 130,840 (-6.7%) YoY.

There were losses all round in the popular market in March, though all low. The worst hit was the Daily Mirror, down only -0.5%.

The yearly figures give a clearer picture for the popular market, with the Daily Mirror performing a little stronger than the other titles, down -4.8% YoY in comparison to the Sun (-12.8%), the Daily Record (-13.1%) and the Daily Star (-13.6%).

Despite its loss, the Sun still has a circulation figure well above 2 million – the highest figure across all of the daily titles.

City A.M. was the only title in the London free press to see any growth – up 0.2% PoP and 28.9% YoY, taking it to a circulation figure of over 128,000.

The Sunday titles didn’t fair much better and were down -12.8% over the yearly period. None of the papers saw YoY increases, however the Independent on Sunday, Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, Sun (Sunday) and Sunday Mail all had slight PoP gains, though PoP circulation was down -0.3% overall.