Hope springs for print
Some recent broadsheet circulation figures have, astonishingly, bucked the longstanding trend of falling sales. STEPHEN GLOVER is keeping his fingers crossed
FOR A DECADE and more, newspaper sales have declined month by month, year by year. Some fall faster than others, but all of them go down inexorably. This has led to the widespread expectation that one day in the not-too-distant future newspapers will only exist online.
But something rather odd has just happened. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which monitors these things, the Times in November increased its sales by nearly five per cent over twelve months to an average of 407,566 a day. It is true these figures conceal a growth in so-called ‘bulk sales’, copies sold to hotels, airlines, rail companies and so forth at a knock-down price for free distribution. All the same, a rise of any kind in print circulation is almost unprecedented in the digital age.
Editors tend to attribute sales growth to their own genius, and it is hardly surprising that the Times’s editor, John Witherow, should suggest that this arresting performance is partly due to his paper’s coverage of big news stories such as the recent Paris attacks. So it may be. The paper has become sharper under his editorship without losing any of its authority. It looks good, too. But I suspect there are additional factors behind the reversal of the long-term trend of steadily falling sales.
The circulation figures of other newspapers in November admittedly do not present a uniformly rosy picture. But it is noteworthy that the Daily Telegraph, which has mislaid a great deal of circulation in recent years, reported a decline of only 2.72 per cent over the previous twelve months. The Daily Mail was down 4.36 per cent year-on-year, the Guardian lost 6.88 per cent and the Independent 7.82 per cent. Among the red-tops, the Sun shed 7.39 per cent of its sales over the previous twelve months, while an alarming 10.04 per cent of the Daily Mirror’s already greatly diminished sale vanished.
How can one make sense of this? I am struck that in the broadsheet market the Murdoch-owned Times, which charges for all internet access, and the Daily Telegraph, which offers twenty free articles a month with payment required thereafter, have fared better than their rivals, which are free online. (I exclude the Financial Times, a specialist paper which does charge.) Among the rivals, the Guardian’s print sales continue to plummet, while its formidable online edition reaches ever greater audiences. Isn’t it pretty clear that broadsheet publishers which put their newspapers free on the internet risk sacrificing a portion of their paid-for print circulation?
I accept that the red-top market is apparently different. The Murdochowned Sun has been haemorrhaging sales for a long time, losing well over a million copies, more than a third of its circulation, in the past five years. In 2013 it started charging its readers online without any discernible effect on the rate of its decline in print sales. That decision was recently reversed. Whereas the Times seems to have gained from having a paywall, the Sun did not. But that may simply suggest that the number of people in this country who want to read such a paper is dwindling.
At all events, there is some evidence that broadsheet papers which retain a paywall, whether completely or in part, are protecting their print circulation better than those that don’t. This would make good financial sense. For there is increasing evidence that online newspapers offer publishers very meagre financial pickings.
Look at mighty Mail Online, the most read newspaper website in the world outside China, which attracts well over 200 million visitors a month. And yet figures just released by its parent company, Daily Mail and General Trust, show that Mail Online’s advertising revenues in 2015 were £73 million in comparison with £242 million generated by the Daily Mail and the Mail On Sunday, which together also produced £257 million in circulation revenues. In other words, the two titles, although they have both lost sales, are still attracting nearly seven times more revenue than the world’s most successful newspaper website.
What is true for Daily Mail and General Trust applies to other publishers. That is why it makes sense for them to nurture newspapers even if sales are sliding. The truth is that the outlook for revenue on the internet remains pretty bleak. The Guardian’s online operation may be a huge editorial succès d’estime, read by millions of people in America who a decade ago had probably never heard of the printed newspaper as we know it. And yet unless there is a revolution in the economics of the internet, this free online prodigy is never going to pay its way, far less turn a profit.
Maybe the Times’s bucking of the circulation trend will turn out to be a passing wonder. I hope not. I concede I may be grasping at straws, but the fact that a newspaper can increase its print circulation even fractionally in the age of the internet fills me with hope. For it seems to me an unchallengeable truth that when newspapers go free online they invariably get worse.