Newspaper Innovation

Today I’m in Vienna, speaking on free newspaper readership. I will cover demographics (are all free daily readers young urban affluent ABC1 disco-goers – disclosure: no they’re not), new reader reach (are news readers added? Yes, they are) and readers per copy (ranging from less than 1 to more than 4).

Data are from several countries, the Netherlands is one of the countries covered. Newest data suggests that free dailies are growing significant while popular papers de Telegraaf and AD lost readers (click on graph for bigger picture).

Another finding is that the number of unique free newspaper readers increased from almost 700,000 in 2002/2004 to more than a million in 2005/2006. Duplication, however, was also substantial. In 2005/2006 both Metro and Spits had around 1.7 million readers, many of them read both free papers and/or both free and paid papers.

In the last survey (2006/2007) readership of both free titles has grown to 1,950,000 for Metro and 1,850,000 for Spits. Newcomer De Pers had 700,000 readers. Unique readership, however, did not increase – indicating that the growth is in double readership and that saturation in total readership is showing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Readership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.