Newspapers record huge mobile readership gains

Mobile continues to play an integral part for readership for most newsbrands – except for The Times and the i, which are still best enjoyed in print, according to the latest NRS (and its soon to be replaced AMP) data.

Increases in readership between July 2016 and June 2017 for The Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent, the Sun, London Evening Standard and Metro were all driven by mobile – which now makes up more than half of total readership for 12 of the measured newsbrands.

Online-only Independent would be in trouble without mobile and tablet readership, which boosts its PC audience by 363%, while increasing the Daily Record’s print and PC audience by 215% and the Mirror’s by 198%.

By contrast, mobile increases The Times’ print and PC audience by just 35%, which retains a loyal 4 million-strong print audience out of a total of 6.4 million readers.

Similarly, of the i’s combined print and digital audience, mobile boosts print and PC readership by 39%.

Note on the data

The latest data is now based on 50% NRS print data and 50% AMP print data. AMP – Audience Measurement for Publishers – is the new currency for published media in the UK and produces de-duplicated brand reach data across mobile, tablet, PC and print. NRS data will now be published with an incremental proportion of AMP data for each subsequent quarter in 2017

The first 100% AMP dataset covering the period of January 2017 to December 2017 will be released in February 2018. The 100% AMP data sets will allow the market to plan de-duplicated reach and frequency campaigns across all platform for the first time, enabling publishers to properly commercialise their huge mobile audiences.

Due to the different methodologies, the PAMCo Board have mandated that NRS and AMP data should not be compared for commercial or marketing purposes.