Feather Brooksbank reviews ABCs: quality national newspaper websites continue to prosper
Charlotte Bell, Director at Feather Brooksbank reviews the latest ABC multi platform report.
Of the five national newspaper websites audited in February, three of them posted impressive growth, interestingly that growth came from the quality titles including guardian.co.uk (+6.85%), independent.co.uk (+10.8%) and telegraph.co.uk (+7.8%). Last month we reported on the performance of regional titles showing the decline of their newspaper formats and growth of their online platforms and these latest figures for national newspapers overall show a very similar pattern.
However, Trinity Mirror had a bit of a shocker with daily average unique browsers falling by 9.2% across their portfolio of sites which includes the Mirror, People, Daily Record and Sunday Mail sites. It’s difficult to understand exactly what’s going on here as the individual sites aren’t reported separately but this follows a fantastic January audit which was up 19.59%.
The other loser month on month was MailOnline which saw a decline of 1.4% since January 2011, but it was once again the most popular national newspaper website with a daily average unique browser figure of well over 3 million. Its nearest rival guardian.co.uk is almost 700,000 daily unique browsers behind.
If we take a closer look at MailOnline, it was back in January 2010 when its number of daily average unique browsers overtook the average issue circulation of the Daily Mail. Over that period the Daily Mail has shown very gradual decline whilst MailOnline has grown significantly, up 39% year on year. In fact since February 2010, the Daliy Mail has lost around 40,000 copy sales per issue while MailOnline has put on an impressive 877,518 daily unique browsers. This is fairly reflective of the pattern across all the national newspaper groups and is very encouraging news for them. The fact that online usage is growing significantly faster than offline usage is declining means national newspapers are attracting a totally new audience. The key question for Associated Newspapers must be whether February’s disappointing performance of MailOnline is the beginning of the plateau of its growth, or is it just a blip in its otherwise impressive performance? I guess the March figures will be a good indication of this.