Industry first: Mobile readership of newsbrands revealed

In an industry first, the NRS is now able to report newsbrand readership figures with the addition of mobile and tablet data to print and PC.

The findings paint a healthy picture for newsbrands, with mobile and tablet (including both websites and apps) increasing readership by an average of 31% across all titles.

The Independent, after earlier this year announcing that it was looking to sell all three of its print titles which currently make a yearly loss of £10 million, saw mobile and tablet increase readership by a huge 48.1% – the greatest addition of all the titles.

Overall, independent.co.uk recorded a combined print, PC, mobile and tablet readership of just under 9.9 million.

Despite having its online content behind a metered paywall, telegraph.co.uk saw mobile and tablet increase readership by 42.3%, making it the third-highest read online news platform behind guardian.com and dailymail.co.uk.

Guardian.com, which has 16.3 million print, PC, mobile and tablet readers, also reaped the rewards of mobile and tablet, which increased its readership by 38.3%.

The Daily Mail‘s online platform, dailymail.co.uk, recorded the highest combined print and digital readership at 23.4 million, with mobile and tablet contributing 31.8% to the overall figure.

Mobile and tablet data also added significantly to mirror.co.uk, with 40% of its 15.6 million readers coming from mobile or tablet; while mobile and tablet increased scotsman.com’s readership by 34.8% to just short of 1.3 million.

Standard.co.uk and metro.co.uk – both of which have free print titles – saw mobile and tablet add 10.2% and 17.7%, respectively; while, perhaps unsurprisingly, thetimes.co.uk – which has been behind a hard paywall since 2010 – saw mobile and tablet add just 3% to its print and PC readership.

The new data has been welcomed by agencies for offering a more complete picture. “Agencies have been crying out for this data ever since the launch of NRS PADD,” said Charlotte Tice, head of publishing at Mindshare.

“This data is a good step forward on the journey to build a much clearer picture of the true reach of print brands and can only be a good thing.”

Since its launch in September 2012, NRS PADD has been providing estimates of the combined reach of print and PC websites based on a fusion of NRS and comScore data. The new mobile and tablet estimates have been added to this dataset, across an initial nineteen of the UK’s leading titles, with additional titles being included in future releases subject to sample sizes and approval.

Click here to view the data for leading magazine brands.

MediaTel subscribers: Mobile and tablet estimates are now included within NRS PADD for selected magazine and news brands. Each platform (Mobile and Tablet, PC/Laptop and Print) can be analysed separately or in any combination to access net reach. Click here for the first set of mobile and tablet data.