What next for the nationals as print readership continues its decline?

As the leader in media planning, monitoring and evaluation, the National Readership Survey findings that print newspaper readership is continuing its incessant decline towards the pit of defunct formats currently inhabited by London Lite, Betamax players and the morals of British footballers, hardly came as a great shock last week. Indeed, Metrica has been blogging regularly on this issue for many years as online media has proliferated and superseded the need to pop to the shop for your local daily.

So what next for the nationals following the NRS announcement? While the Independent’s 12% reader decline is no huge surprise following its recent attention on sister title i, perhaps the most telling figures are those for The Times and FT, down 15% and 12% in readership respectively in comparison with 2010. The only increase, perhaps a partial reaction to the political landscape, is for The Guardian, up 3% year on year. If the rumour mill is to be believed, Times Online’s paywall structure has also stalled and is attracting only the most devout followers, losing around 90% of its readership with a reported paltry 85,000 daily subscribers. From the look of these figures, one could argue the paywall model has impacted the loyalty of its print readers too.

According to Metrica’s UKPulse survey just 1% of UK adults would pay for premium content, while 42% of UK adults don’t read a daily newspaper, up from 39% last year. This of course means that 58% still do, with the Sun and Daily Mail leading the way. Therefore, capturing this ever-decreasing group’s attention, as well as capitalising on the burgeoning online audience, is paramount to a paper’s ability to drive sales and advertising revenue.

Indeed, the FT’s Circulation Director Martin Ashford addressed this very issue in InPublishing by concluding that ABC’s monthly circulation figures don’t reflect current market trends and as such are misleading advertisers, but also identified the importance of global readers, as well as apps and mobile, to the readership spectrum. With Mail Online having just launched a 60 day trial on its app, leaping into the market alongside current market leaders (The Sunday Times was recently awarded Newspaper App of the Year at the Newspaper Awards, with Guardian Online awarded Best Use of New Media) the frenzy for app subscriptions is hotting up. While NewsCorp’s iPad-only The Daily failed to wow (perhaps due to a lack of reader heritage), Guardian Online’s 400,000 plus app downloads, combined with its increase in newspaper readers, suggest dominating this market can have a positive impact on print readership. Attracting mobile readers with exclusive content, or perhaps exclusive partnerships with operators or device manufacturers, could prove the natural evolution towards regaining revenue streams for our aging print media icons.

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