Feature: Sunday Broadsheets

The Sunday broadsheets are distinctive from their commuter friendly weekday siblings due to their sections. Only the Sunday Business, which also has the lowest circulation of the group, offers less than six, while the biggest paper by circulation, the Sunday Times, also has the most sections with 12.

The advantage to advertisers of these sections is the ability to target foodies, motorists, travellers and so on. However, the NRS suggests that, unable to cope with so much reading matter in a weekend, the number of people buying both a Saturday and a Sunday title, whether broadsheet, mid-market or tabloid, dropped by 500,000 over the last three years.

An increasingly time-poor society is also changing the behaviour of readers. The latest wave of VIPer research, which studies ABC1s, showed that two years ago 38% of respondents said they continued reading the supplements during the week. This figure had risen to 43% by June this year. Perhaps less encouragingly, only just over 20% of respondents said they read supplements because they felt they were relevant to their lifestyle.

With the exception of mid-market leader the Daily Mail, readership of Sunday newspapers tends to show a male bias. Among the broadsheets this is most pronounced at the Sunday Times, which is read by 1.8m men and 1.3m women.

The landscape of the Sunday broadsheet market looks set to see change in the future, however. Recent NRS reports have shown shrinking readership for the market leader, the Sunday Times, which dropped 4.2% of its readership year on year in the August figures, although the full, and reportedly positive, effect on newspaper sales of September 11 have yet to be revealed. Meanwhile, the Observer is regularly recording year on year rises of around 10% or more.

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