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June 3, 2015updated 19 Aug 2015 3:58pm

NRS: UK monthly readership of Sun falls behind Independent amid mobile traffic surge

By Dominic Ponsford

Mail Online now has nearly twice as many UK readers per month on mobile as it does on desktop computers, according to the National Readership Survey.

The body has revised its methodology to have a greater focus on mobile and tablets.

The results have seen a large increase in overall monthly readership estimates for most UK major newspaper brands.

The latest combined figures are for the year to March 2015 and only cover daily titles.

They give the Daily Mail/Mail Online a combined monthly reach in the UK of 29m readers, up from 23.5m under the old system.

According to NRS, Mail Online had 10.2m readers on desktop computers in March and 19m on tablets/smartphones.

This is a 10m increase in estimated mobile readership for Mail Online compared with the last quarterly NRS estimate.

For the Mirror website the contrast is even more stark, with 4.8m UK readers a month on desktop and 15.6m a month on mobile.

The NRS figures suggest that the paywalled Sun has now fallen to seventh place, behind The Independent, in terms of overall monthly readership.

The Independent’s free website attracts some 10.8m mobile readers per month versus 1.5m for The Sun.

The Guardian has overtaken The Daily Telegraph to take third place in the NRS monthly readership table.

Because the NRS figures are monthly rather than daily they throw up some anomalies.

The Guardian has a daily print circulation of of 180,000 versus the Daily Telegraph’s 480,000.

But the NRS says that both titles reach over 3.7m readers a month in print.

This suggests a higher pass-on rate for The Guardian and possibly a more varied audience over the course of the month.

The NRS print readership figures are based on a survey of 35,000 people over the course of a year.

The digital data comes from Comscore which uses a variety of methods to estimate digital readership for March.

Previously, Comscore’s data for website usage came from mobile network companies and excluded many apps, readers on Wifi networks and those using secure (https) website addresses.

Comscore now uses a survey-based approach, tracking the actions of 5,500 readers on a panel, to estimate mobile website usage.

NRS newspaper monthly readership estimate for year to March 2015

Title Net Print, PC and Mobile Total Total Print Total PC Total Mobile
Daily Mail / dailymail.co.uk 29,074,000 10,515,000 10,248,000 18,955,000
Daily Mirror / mirror.co.uk 22,920,000 6,630,000 4,803,000 15,583,000
The Guardian / theguardian.com 21,608,000 3,739,000 10,011,000 14,474,000
The Daily Telegraph / telegraph.co.uk 21,077,000 3,798,000 9,082,000 13,634,000
Metro / metro.co.uk 17,232,000 10,354,000 2,423,000 8,322,000
The Independent / independent.co.uk 15,628,000 2,120,000 5,346,000 10,810,000
The Sun / thesun.co.uk 13,585,000 12,329,000 843,000 1,459,000
Daily Express / express.co.uk 10,197,000 2,884,000 2,421,000 5,868,000
London Evening Standard / standard.co.uk 8,285,000 5,069,000 1,516,000 3,231,000
Daily Star / dailystar.co.uk 7,753,000 2,807,000 1,392,000 4,208,000
The Times / thetimes.co.uk 4,992,000 4,205,000 416,000 745,000
Daily Record / dailyrecord.co.uk 4,454,000 1,315,000 965,000 3,094,000
The Scotsman / scotsman.com 1,188,000 351,000 643,000 329,000

NRS newspaper monthly readership estimate for year to December 2014

Title Net readership Print Computer Mobile/tablet
Daily Mail 23,449,000 10,636,000 11,318,000 9,908,000
Daily Mirror 17,484,000 6,847,000 6,060,000 7,941,000
Daily Telegraph 16,357,000 3,923,000 9,358,000 7,016,000
The Guardian 16,314,000 3,653,000 10,488,000 6,824,000
Metro 14,211,000 10,281,000 3,145,000 3,364,000
The Sun 13,628,000 12,658,000 959,000 843,000
The Independent 10,442,000 2,140,000 5,640,000 4,508,000
Daily Express 6,839,000 3,019,000 2,288,000 2,200,000
London Evening Standard 6,718,000 4,924,000 1,596,000 1,159,000
The Times 4,911,000 4,358,000 469,000 348,000
Daily Record 2,978,000 1,395,000 923,000 1,181,000
The Scotsman 1,252,000 350,000 649,000 424,000

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