The Weekly PR & Social Scoop - 14th Mar

PR NEWS?

The Economist is attracting younger readers with cut-price Espresso digital edition

With just over one million subscribers in print and online, The Economist?remains a powerhouse for quality paid-for journalism globally.

Based in the UK, but with an international audience, the title provided a spark of light in some otherwise gloomy magazine ABC figures for the second half of 2023 with its daily mobile phone edition, Espresso. Espresso, which launched in 2014 but has only published audited circulation numbers since 2022, grew 74% year on year to an average of 21,775 subscribers per day. ?

The Economist spokespeople noted the success of the platform was down to the bite-sized nature of its news, providing a feed of only the most important news stories of the day. It is aimed largely at a younger, female audience, fulfilling and meeting the needs of a different demographic to the Economist’s core product. But largely, it puts its success down to being mobile-only, targeting mobile-first audiences. The hope, of course, is that Espresso consumers will eventually grow to become Economist subscribers who will invest in the ￡20-plus traditional print magazine.

February national ABC’s revealed

The Financial Times?saw the biggest month-on-month drop in print circulation among the publicly audited national newspapers in February.

The FT had an average circulation of 108,125 in February according to ABC, down 6% compared to January – although it lost just 0.4% compared to a year earlier. However, the FT also had a digital edition circulation of 16,403, up 5% month-on-month.

The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday are top of the table among the paid-for newspapers that have their ABC circulations published, with circulations of 705,311 and 600,311 respectively.

However, sitting pretty in the top spot?was free newspaper Metro, with a huge average circulation of 953,233 in February.

Full analysis of the February data can be found here.

SOCIAL MEDIA? ?

TikTok Rewards?Long Form Content

TikTok’s Creator Reward Programme now requires videos longer than one minute to be eligible for monetisation. ?

The platform’s Creativity programme was introduced last year to reward creators who published longer videos.

The new rewards programme will now focus on originality, play duration, search value, and audience engagement when calculating earnings. Users have embraced longer-form content on TikTok since the app allowed lengthier videos in 2022, with the platform reporting that viewers now spend more than half of their time watching such content.?

Elon Musk plans further changes to X

X is planning to remove the reply, like and re-share buttons on X’s posts in-feed, leaving only the total view count and time posted.?

Musk responded to a post on X on the possible change:?“That is definitely happening. Just view count, as proxy for the other metrics, will show on the timeline”.?

The removal of the three icons is X’s attempt to make its feed “very clean”, whilst also implementing new actions to respond to posts such?“swipe right to reply”, and “swipe left to like”.