According to Comscore, in March 2011 the Mail and Guardian online were level pegging at 40-41 million odd visitors.      However by August, the Guardian was in distant second place with the Mail attracting an amazing 85 million visitors / month compared to the Guardian’s 53 million.

It is worth mentioning that the major UK newspaper brands now get a large share of their web traffic from outside the country.    As far back as 2009, Comscore showed that between 48%-73% of  UK newspaper site visitors were from outside the UK and I’d imagine that % will have increased by now.

A point to bear in mind if you are a UK PR getting coverage in the online edition of a UK newspaper – most of those X million eyeballs you quote your client in the coverage report are from outside the country.   Of course, that could be a positive depending who the client is.

Back in March, The Guardian said that the Mail was the second most popular English language news site after the New York Times.   It will be interesting to see if the Mail now has the no.1 spot, especially post the NYT’s (partial) pay wall.

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Last month there was a fair amount of comment around Rupert Murdoch’s much-stated faith in Apple’s iPad and his $30 million investment in an iPad only newspaper, provisionally called “Daily” – due for release in January.

A hint of what it might look like can be seen in the Sunday Times iPad app, which, actually – having swapped it for the print edition today – is pretty good.   Just like Richard Branson’s iPad magazine ‘Project’ it mimics the newspaper reading experience pretty well by using the iPad’s screen, and like Project it adds in interactive extras such as film clips.

Signing up to a Times Plus digital subscription at £8 a month (around US $12.50), gives you access to both the Times and Sunday Times iPad apps, as well as the Times online paywall.   Given that the Sunday Times print edition already costs £2.20, you actually save money by switching to the iPad version, which begs the question if the result will be to canabilise its own print buyers.

There are questions over how many digital subscribers the Times / Sunday Times actually has.   Estimates range from 100k to 360k.     That’s certainly not a lot compared to, say, the Mail Online which according to Comscore sees 32 million people visit the newspaper’s site every month and was recently touted by the New York Times as an online newspaper publishing phenomenon.

But then again the counter argument is: Does that actually matter as not all visitors are created equally – or the fallacy of the ‘big number.’   Last year journalism and SEO blogger Malcolm Coles wrote that 62.8% of visitors to the online editions of UK newspapers only look at a single page and leave – in other words online news is often treated as a commodity.   You find what you want and click away.

Arguably someone who pays will hang around, becoming more valuable to advertisers.   Time will tell if Rupert Murdoch is right and the business model he’s adopting combining online subscriptions with smartphone and tablet applications actually works.

(Chart Malcolm Coles)

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Plenty has been written about the decline of print newspapers, less so about the magazine industry.   Now South African journalist Herman Manson points us towards the FIPP World Magazine Trends 2010/2011, which “will make grim reading for magazine publishers.”

According to the report while global advertising revenue declined by 10.6% in 2009, magazine ad spend was down by 20.2%.   And though this year, global ad revenues will be up 4.8%, magazine publishers will still see their share drop by 1.8%

Two other findings worth noting:

As with newspapers, the Internet is playing its part, with online ad spend increasing from 12.8% of all ad spend in 2009 to 16.5% on 2012.

Secondly, emerging markets are not the saviour of the magazine industry in the same way they are of newspapers.   Earlier this year an OECD report showed that while every member country saw its newspaper industry shrink (in the case of the US and UK -30% and -21% respectively), in emerging markets newspaper sales were up.

However, FIPP’s global magazine report shows that in Brazil, a key emerging market, the magazine advertising market declined by 8.5% in 2010 while in China magazine ads are expected to decline to 1.6% of all ad spend in 2012 from 2% today.

Image – Mark Hogan

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An excellent infographic (thanks Comscore Data Mine!) about online newspaper reading habits.   It clearly shows two things – reading online newspapers is at a peak mid-day, so when people are in the office.

Some of that will be people checking out the football scores while at work, though arguably a proportion will also come from people who need to access online papers for the day jobs (e.g. a lot of FT online subscriptions are paid for by employers as expenses)

Secondly, the % of newspaper reading that happens by phone is very low – 2%.   That could reflect the fact that not all papers are optimised for mobile use, and also the fact that only 1/4 of us in Europe have smartphones, which you need to make online newspaper reading a reasonable experience.   As for iPads…needless to say reflecting its (still) niche status, it has less than 1% of overall views.

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As a result, it’s interesting to note a milestone from the US.   A study by Journalistics shows that the NY Times has become the 1st major newspaper to have more Twitter followers than print subscribers (2,668,948 vs 951,000)

That stat has attracted a fair amount of attention, but it’s of course as much testament to the New York Times’ successful online strategy as it is to the state of the newspaper market.

And the UK?  According to the Wallblog, so far every UK newspaper has a Twitter following far below its print subscription, with the FT coming closest (216k Twitter followers @financialtimes vs 390k print buyers)

FT’s iPad app makes £1 million

The Financial Times might not yet be more popular on Twitter than in print, but it is on the iPad, where 400,000 people have downloaded the application.

According to the paper’s deputy chief executive Ben Hughes, it has also netted £1 million in advertising revenue since May.

Separately, Nielsen found that 91% of iPad owners have downloaded applications (correcting an earlier story that 32% didn’t download an app), with games, books and music being the most popular categories.

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• Is the iPad Really the Savior of the Newspaper Industry? (mashable.com)

Americans today consume 70 minutes worth of news a day – that’s 22.8% more than 2000.   The 57 minutes of news received via the traditional media of TV, radio and newspapers remain the same, yet on top of that there are now 13 minutes spent getting news online.     The online news total of 13 minutes is also now ahead of the print news total of 10 minutes.

That latter stat provides a good counter weight to the one released by the Columbia Journalism Review last year claiming that 88% of newspaper reading time is in print.   Perhaps both those surveys together point to the way we consume news being different, with online news being increasingly a commodity.   So we read the newspaper in print, but we read the article online.

Interesting as well that Pew also found that news searches were up, showing that we are much more single minded in finding something, getting what we want (with the publication being often secondary), and moving onto another site.

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The same conclusion can be drawn from the most recent piece of Pew Research, showing that even while newspapers are shedding readers, more and more Americans are getting their news online.  Pew found that nearly half (46%) of Americans get their news online at least three days a week, up from 29% in 2004.

News searches up, while overall search down
The recent Nielsen stats showed a fairly hefty 16% year on year decrease in US search volumes.   However, Pew found that 34% of the Internet going public still employ search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing three days a week to search for news.  This is triple the number that did so in 2004.

This might give credence to the theory that social media has meant more people getting recommendations for products and places to go from friends, but when it comes to looking for things trending in the news, search still rules.

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On one hand, an OECD report (via a post by Erina Lin in sfnblog) again confirms that in the UK and US the newspaper market is in a steady period of decline.   And on the other hand, an article in AdAge, shows that digital revenues almost certainly aren’t making up the losses.

The OECD shows that between 2007-2009 not a single member country saw an increase in the newspaper market.  Note, that the OECD’s definition of the newspaper market is: “Online and offline circulation and advertising revenues of traditional newspaper publishers” – in other words everything that traditional papers do to make money.

The US (-30% decline) and the UK (-21%) very much led the way, though among English speaking countries, Australia bucked the trend, ‘only’ seeing a 3% fall in the same period.

Here is another chart from the same report showing that while seniors are still most likely to read a paper, the % who regularly read a newspaper in the US has been going down among all age groups.

50% of UK newspaper revenues down to sales
Though the US and UK lead the world in their shrinking newspaper industries, they are affected in different ways.

With 50% of revenue coming from circulations, UK newspapers are more at risk from changing demographics, with younger consumers in particular not being in the habit of buying a morning paper.   With 87% of revenue coming from advertising, US publishers have by comparison been hit harder by the general economic downturn.

US Newspapers now only have 30% of the digital advertising pie
However, circulations and ad revenues are clearly linked, and here is the bad news.

From the AdAge article, ‘Mounting Web Woes Pummel Newspapers’, US Newspapers are not succeeding in getting a decent share of the whole digital advertising pie.   Even as digital advertising as a whole increases in value, US papers’ share of the total has gone down to around 30%.

In fact, writing on Australian Marketing website Mumbrella over a year ago, journalism professor Stephen Quinn pointed out that while classified advertising used to represent 40% of newspaper profits back in 2000, thanks to the likes of Gumtree and Craigslist, that total had gone down to 23%.

More tellingly, Professor Quinn said that when looking at the New York Times, its online advertising revenues would only pay for a fifth of its news gathering budget.

Before we start writing off newspapers completely though, there are another set of figures from the OECD report worth looking at.  While the OECD countries saw their newspaper markets decline, when you look at emerging markets such as South Africa, India, China and Brazil, a completely different picture emerges.

While circulations in OECD countries went down year by year from 2003-2008 in the so-called BIICS (Brazil, India, Indonesia, China, South Africa) they steadily went up.    To take India as just one example, the % that regularly reads a newspaper went up from 17% in 2003 to 37% in 2008.

As a result, worldwide – certainly outside of the minority of countries where Internet penetration is 50% – the newspaper industry is actually a growth industry.

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With the other UK nationals (the FT aside) and the BBC continuing to provide online news for free and with online news arguably being a commodity, the Independent points out that the challenge will be to make subscribers think they are getting something they won’t get elsewhere.

Though advertising revenues don’t as yet cover online news budgets, the Telegraph for one has adopted a different model for making money online.

According to a Paid Content article last year, 20-30% of online revenues come from a core of 2-3% of users who buy into extras such as the Telegraph’s fantasy cricket and football games and the Clued Up puzzle service, which charges ?2.99 a month for basic subscription

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Three US based stats from Alan’s blog:

1 – Classified advertising is down a massive 64% from the $17.3 billion it brought US papers in 2005.  Thanks Craiglist, and in the UK, the likes of gumtree

2 – Retail advertising was down 36% over the same period

3 – National advertising was down 44% since 2005

The problem is of course also a demographic one.   Apparently in the US, the average age of newspaper readers is 55+ as shown in the video below (via Steveouting.com).

And the UK probably isn’t too different in that respect, a Parliamentary Committee two years ago found that newspaper readership fell 40% among 25-34 year olds, but rose by 4% among 55-64 year olds – and if anything that trend will have increased over the past two years, given that the UK nationals have lost more than the population of Wales in readers since then.

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