The Sun and The Daily Mail are no longer Britain’s most widely-circulated newspapers after disastrous sales figures announced today saw them knocked into second and third place in terms of circulation.
New figures released today by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) saw The Sun’s sales figure drop by a massive 8% in the last year, whilst The Daily Mail’s sales were hit even harder, racking up 11% fewer sales from February 2017 to February 2018.
Both Sunday editions of these titles – the Sun on Sunday and The Mail on Sunday – also saw huge declines in circulation – falling by 9.2% and 12.97% respectively over the same period.
The Metro – a free newspaper circulated on many British public transport services and stations – has climbed ahead of the right-wing heavyweight publications after seeing their figures remain relatively stable, with only a tiny 0.25% drop in circulation.
Other right-wing titles to see declines in their circulations include The Daily Telegraph, whose figures fell by over 18%, The Express who saw a 7.5% drop, and The Daily Star who recorded an almost 11% decline.
Overall the figures for virtually all daily newspaper titles declined substantially in the last year, with The Daily Mirror and The Sunday Mirror seeing the sharpest declines of 19% and 20% respectively.
Whilst daily newspaper circulation figures declined across the board, the substantially bigger decline in The Mirror‘s figures (a typically left-leaning Labour-supporting publication who are still relatively ambiguous in their support for Jeremy Corbyn) compared to the rest (except for The Telegraph at -18%) could well be attributed in part to the staggering rise of ardently pro-Corbyn online Independent New Media such as The Canary, Skwawkbox and ourselves.
Below are the full figures produced by ABC:
However, The Daily Mail’s misery didn’t stop at their printed titles after the company also saw the number of views they receive on their website fall by over 13% in February 2018 – racking up 13,516,050 unique views.
The Sun compared much better, increasing their website traffic by over 15% to 5,108,004 unique views in February.
However, when you consider the massive funding and investment that these organisations receive, as well as the huge number of staff they employ, their relatively low website views and the decline in print sales will surely soon become substantial problems for both organisations.
Evolve Politics regularly nets more than a million views every month, and our financial outlay is minuscule compared to The Daily Mail or The Sun. Furthermore, our viewing figures pale in comparison to the likes of The Canary who, according to SimilarWeb, regularly garner over 3 million views every month.
With newspaper sales declining rapidly, and with independent media virtually matching the big boys online at a fraction of the outlay, it really is only a matter of time before the owners of The Sun, The Daily Mail and the rest of the right-wing media start to panic about the increasing financial inviability of their operations.
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