Feature: Tabloids Shed Readers As Tastes Shift

The UK’s red-top tabloids have had a hard time of it over the last decade as the sector as a whole has stumbled into a seemingly relentless decline in both readers and sales. At the same time, mid-market papers Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday have shown a consistent growth in sales and reader-base at a time when most other national newspapers are suffering from the explosion in new media. The fact that the only other four national newspapers to successfully increase their circulations across the Nineties are all quality broadsheets shows a palpable shift in the public’s reading tastes in daily papers.

The Mirror, Sun and Daily Star all noted this trend and the success of the Daily Mail and began to edge themselves upmarket accordingly. The Mirror and Sun each began to concentrate more on the quality of its news content and the Daily Star a year and a half ago decided to move away from its ‘smutty’ image with a redesign and new masthead.

However, despite these moves by the red-top publishers, the popular tabloid sector remains a waning one. This is partly due to the young demographic profile of the titles’ readers – each of the popular tabloids’ has a readership that is heavy in the 15-34 year old group. According to figures from the NRS, the number of 15-34 year olds reading national newspapers declined by 7.2 million or 22.2% between 1995 and 1999. Over the same period, the 35-54 year old audience contracted by just 6.9% overall. This loss of young people, as they move particularly towards consumer magazines and, more recently, the internet, has seen the tabloids’ readership base decline at a faster rate than the national newspaper market as a whole.

The whole of the national newspaper sector experienced a fall of more than two million copy sales across the last decade, according to ABC data. The popular tabloids contributed to three quarters of all sales lost during this period and a more severe decline across the whole national sector was only prevented by strong growth from the two Mail titles, the Times, Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph. The popular sector has shed over 8 million readers since 1993, whilst the mid-market and quality market lost only two million readers each over the same period. The particular appeal of the internet to younger readers is likely to continue to hit the red-tops harder than the quality broadsheets and figures from the last couple of years would so far indicate this.