Newspaper Innovation

Swedish researchers Peter Callius and Anders Lithner (Sifo Research International) presented a paper “Daily Reach and Beyond” at the Readership Symposium in Vienna last month. In this paper – which was awarded as best paper of the conference – they showed detailed information on changing readership patterns of paid and free dailies in Sweden on different days of the week.

Paid morning subscription papers show almost no variation in readership on different weekdays although readership tends to go up on Sunday. Evening papers have a relatively low readership on Monday and Tuesday, and a high readership on Saturday and Sunday. Free dailies have a slow start on Monday, grow slightly from Tuesday to Thursday and see a sharp drop on Friday. Advertising on Thursday seems to be the best option (like cutting down distribution on Fridays).

The paper also shows the impact of the third Swedish free daily Punkt.SE in Stockholm. From the data is is clear that the two other free dailies (Metro and City) were hurt the most by the new title.

The paper is available online and can be downloaded from the ‘resources‘ page.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 1:57 am and is filed under Research. 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.