Insight Analysis: National Newspapers Look To Boost Female Readership With New Saturday Offerings
The Guardian newspaper last week unveiled investment plans for its Saturday edition. Weekend magazine is to become a glossy with 60% more editorial pages and two of the newspaper’s weekday supplements – Space and The Editor – will be added to its current six sections.
Changes to the Guardian are also skewed towards the female market. Its Weekend magazine will now include coverage of beauty, fitness, well-being and relationships, adding further scope for advertisers. GNL advertisement director Stuart Taylor, said: “These fantastic developments will offer additional opportunities Â… We know that the introduction of beauty coverage and a greater number of fashion pages will be attractive for advertisers.”
Research conducted by the Guardian showed that people have more time to digest the paper on a Saturday and this is showing in the latest readership data. All daily titles, with the exception of the Daily Star and the Financial Times, had more readers on a Saturday than during the week in 2000, according to the latest data from the National Readership Survey (NRS).
The Guardian and the Mirror increase their readership by 15% and 9% respectively on a Saturday. Both titles currently attract a slightly higher male readership to their Saturday editions.
Across its core BC1 market the Saturday Guardian has 476,000 female readers compared to 536,000 men. Weekend magazine also attracts more men and has an older female readership: while total readers of the magazine are largely from the 25-44 age group, women readers lean towards the upper end of this age range while men are more likely to be between 25 and 34.
Readers of the Mirror on a Saturday are more likely to come from higher age groups. Of the 4.6m readers in its core C1C2D category, 52% of men and 54% of women are over the age of 45.
Amongst other dailies the Express and the Mail see the greatest boosts to their readership on a Saturday, adding an average 16% to their readership base, with their Saturday magazines achieving higher readership figures than the newspapers themselves.