New circulation figures for January make surprisingly cheery reading – especially for broadsheet publishers
A soggy January for sales, too? Interestingly not, especially with new ABC-audited trends emerging. Now it's the "popular" papers who feel most pain (7.83% down year-on-year) while the quality press dropped only 3.87% and major performers in that field did markedly better: the Guardian and the i both up on January 2013, with the Daily Telegraph recording only a 2.03% drop and the Times – 3.76% off the pace – still posting a decline the Mirror or Sun would settle for in a trice. And the picture isn't very different on Sundays, where the Observer and Sunday Telegraph both claim small yearly gains.
Of course promotions, new sections and all that jazz have a part to play: they put temporary wind in quite a few sails. But when what habitually goes down actually goes up again there's cause to pause, smile a little, and analyse one sector at a time.
■ ABC has also combined print and digital magazine data for the first time – and the striking thing isn't how big online mag editions are (from June to December 2013) but how puny. Take What's on TV, a print heavyweight with 1,049,558 sales – and just 1,501 UK online buyers (only 194 paying full rate). Or Woman and Home, another print champion with 353,000, but a minimal 452 full-raters online. Is the New Statesman – 28,495 in print and 441 online – the future? Are we supposed to gag over Top Gear's digital edition – with one full-rate subscriber? Or Angler's Mail, with 27,709 print purchasers and 54 online? But maybe you can't wrap your lugworms in an iPad. Hype hype hooray!
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