The Dynamics of Newspaper Masthead Consumption

Newspaper mastheads are performing really strongly.

Remarkable what has happened over 5 years. This sector is far more dynamic and resilient than expected! With a significant amount of retail sales for popular dailies, compared with home delivery (especially for Nationals and leading morning dailies), we would have expected a slightly different pattern. The richness of studying trends over time truly reveals the consumer pattern!?

Largely, newspapers keep trending up or at least maintain their position. Surprisingly only a very modest effect during COVID-19, and more felt by leading morning dailies (SMH/Age) than any others.

Another aspect that we find interesting and perhaps curious, is the amount of non-home State?traffic (nearly all digital derived), mostly around 50% of traffic coming from outside the home publishing market. Notable outliers include the Telegraph at 64.72% and the Herald-Sun at 66.27%.?

PRINT

Nationals on a tear, blitzing it. These consumers are the least affected by the now quite pressing cost-of-living pressures.

Leading morning dailies are just about treading water/holding their own.Popular mass dailies possess really solid performance.?

CROSS-PLATFORM

Nationals, perhaps to be expected, as so much of circulation and readership is the big end of town, really, really solid. Digital taking an increased share of readership, moving nearly 8 share points over in the past five years.

Leading morning dailies just dipped on significantly sized digital audiences, but not moved much over half a decade. They hold a dominant digital share of nearly 80%, but this share isn't trending upward noticeably.

Popular dailies about holding, with towards a 4-point share gain to digital over the past half-decade.?

DIGITAL

Over this half decade, page views have exploded, with a truly and remarkable gargantuan increase by The Australian… up 577% in 5 years. No one else within a rocket range of this; most well under 100% increase over the 5 years.

Melding into this is dwell time. This is naturally as a consequence of Page views which have increased substantially for Nationals, up 71.36% over the half-decade.However, other publishing categories have seen declines: leading morning dailies have dropped by 31.81%, and popular mass dailies by a similar 34.89%.

Naturally, Page Views per session exploded.

Another aspect is dwell time per session, which varies greatly, ranging from just under a minute to around half a minute.Audience-wise, newspapers are in very good health. So, why aren’t advertisers using and returning? A burning question? Especially as they are mostly very negotiable and very cost-efficient, especially print editions.

Steve Allen