The Mail titles and Mail Online are the most popular news brand in the UK according to the National Readership Survey (NRS), but younger readers favour The Sun.
Print readership figures for the 12 months to September 2014, and website figures for September 2014, show The Sun has more younger readers than the Mail titles – with more than four million people aged 15-34 reading it each week, versus 3.8m younger readers for the Mail titles.
This is despite the fact that The Sun's paywall means it has a comparitively tiny weekly online readership of 319,000.
The figures are provided by the NRS (full data here) and combine its annual survey of print readership with web readership figures from Comscore for the month of September. The Comscore figures only include PC data, not mobile and tablets (which now comprise the majority of readers for some websites).
In general, the Mail titles (Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail Online) have the most weekly readers according to NRS, with a combined weekly reach of 13.9m adults aged over 15, followed by The Sun on 11.2m and Metro with 8.2m.
The Mail is also the most read online, with 6.4m weekly readers, followed by The Guardian with 5.4m weekly readers in September 2014.
More prosperous ABC1 readers (categorised as upper-middle class to lower-middle class) favour the Mail titles, with 9.1m weekly readers in this category. The Star ranks the lowest with richer readers, with 980,000 reading it per week.
Among C2DE people (skilled working class to non-working people) The Sun was the most popular publication, while The Times is least popular. Among this demographic, 7m people read The Sun newspaper and 105,000 read the website weekly compared to 4.7m C2DE people who read the Mail.
The Star and The Sun each have 64 per cent of their readership in the C2DE social grouping. These tabloids stand in contrast to The Times and The Guardian's more affulent audience, comprised of 84 per cent and 79 per cent in the ABC1 category, respectively.
The Star has the largest proportion of male readers, at 66 per cent, while the Mail is the only paper to have a majority of female readers, with 50.2 per cent of its audience being women.
The data reveals that online viewing of newspapers is highest with young adults aged 15-35.
The Sun has the most younger readers with 4m 15-35 year olds reading either online or in print per week. The Express titles have the least younger readers of any UK-wide national newspaper audited by NRS with 600,000 on a weekly basis.
The Guardian has the youngest readership according to NRS, with 37.5 per cent of its 7.2m weekly readers aged between 15 and 34. Some 797,000 young adults read its newspaper each week, while 2.1m visit its website.
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
