According to the publishers, News UK: The figures, which measure aggregate, de-duplicated readership across print, website, mobile and tablet, show The Times’ weekly readership increasing by 8% and The Sunday Times weekly readership by 1.39%.
The numbers are a validation of News UK’s paid-for-content approach and demonstrate that an established title can continue to grow readership strongly whilst operating a digital subscription strategy.
The data shows that, despite a long term trend towards declining print readership, new digital platforms are more than making up for lost print consumers. Despite a 2% drop in weekly print readership, The Times saw a rise in aggregate weekly readership from 4.242 million to 4.574 million. Meanwhile, The Sunday Times more than made up for a 1% drop in print readership by growing total readers from 3.449 million to 3.497 million.
The strong aggregate readership growth comes as News UK Commercial launches a new, cross platform advertising proposition across The Times and The Sunday Times. The new ‘One Audience’ package lets advertisers access the whole range of Times’ audiences across multiple editions and platforms with a single booking. As well as simplifying the ad-booking process, One Audience also gives advertisers easier access to the whole spectrum of The Times and Sunday Times ABC1 readership across all platforms.
Dylan Wyn-Pugh, Head of Strategy, The Times and Sunday Times, said: “These figures clearly demonstrate that it’s possible to combine a paid-for-content strategy with strong organic readership growth and, as such, are great news for the media industry as a whole. What’s even more important is that, because many of the new readers are coming on board as subscribers rather than casual purchasers, we have a much closer relationship with them. This means that we can offer advertisers even more insight and understanding to help them plan targeted and effective advertising campaigns.”
“The aggregate readership figure is a far more useful measure of a title’s impact than simply looking at the print numbers. We know from research that a print reader’s experience of our titles is very similar to a tablet reader’s in terms of the way they navigate the title and the amount of time they spend reading it. Given that the experience is qualitatively so similar then it makes sense that the growth of the papers should be counted across platforms.
“The One Audience advertising package is a recognition of the equivalence of print and tablet readers and lets our advertisers access the full range of Times readers without the need to buy multiple packages.”
