Mail Online, Metro and the Mirror all now attract more readers to their websites from mobiles than they do from personal computers.
New evidence of the shift from desktop to mobile news readership is provided in the latest figures from the National Readership Survey, which include mobile for the first time.
The data suggests Mail Online's mobile raedership in the UK stands at 10.8m per month, versus 9.6m on personal computers. The NRS claims that the Mirror now attracts 6.2m readers a month on mobile devices, versus 4.9m on PCs, and Metro 3.6m on mobile versus 2.9m on PCs.
The NRS data combines print readership for the year to June 2014 with Comscore website data for June 2014. Both web and print numbers are based on a survey of the general public, rather than actual circulation or information from server logs.
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The figures suggest that The Guardian and the Telegraph are neck and neck in terms of UK readership with both achieving a monthly reach of 16.3m. The term ‘reach’ equates to the number of people reading the paper or the website at least once.
The NRS suggests that the Daily Mail/Mail Online is the most read national newspaper brand in the UK with a monthly reach of 23.4m. According to the Mail, this means it now reaches 48.3 per cent of UK adults every month.
According to the Mail, its online readers spend an average of 49.9 minutes with the website very month and visit it an average of 13.4 times.
The NRS claims that The Times has a print readership 4.4m (which puts it ahead of the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian in print-only terms).
But The Times’s UK digital readership said by the NRS to be around 356,000 per month, compared with 12.5m for both The Guardian and the Telegraph.
The NRS data suggests that Guardian print readership is almost as high as the Daily Telegraph, despite having much less than half the circulation. The NRS said this is because The Guardian tends to be passed on between readers more.
The Guardian’s monthly print readership reach for the year to June is estimated at 3.8m by NRS, versus a current ABC print circulation of 178,000.
The Telegraph’s monthly print readership is estimated at 4.1m (versus an ABC of 512,000).
The new figures from the NRS are just for daily titles and their websites and omit The Sun, Express and Star titles.
UK national daily newspaper print and online readership (source NRS)
| Title | Net monthly reach | Print reach | PC reach | Mobile reach |
| Daily Mail/ Mail Online | 23,365,000 | 10,883,000 | 9,557,000 | 10,793,000 |
| The Guardian/ Theguardian.com | 16,276,000 | 3,810,000 | 9,579,000 | 7,354,000 |
| Daily Telegraph/ Telegraph.co.uk | 16,271,000 | 4,066,000 | 8,605,000 | 7,509,000 |
| Daily Mirror/ Mirror.co.uk | 15,563,000 | 6,962,000 | 4,877,000 | 6,240,000 |
| Metro/ Metro.co.uk | 14,217,000 | 10,027,000 | 2,920,000 | 3,645,000 |
| The Independent/ Independent.co.uk | 9,863,000 | 2,235,000 | 4,919,000 | 4,366,000 |
| Evening Standard/ Standard.co.uk | 6,190,000 | 4,622,000 | 1,334,000 | 969,000 |
| The Times/ Thetimes.co.uk | 4,798,000 | 4,442,000 | 302,000 | 298,000 |
| The Scotsman/ Scotsman.com | 1,274,000 | 368,000 | 632,000 | 428,000 |
Figures are to the nearest 100,000.
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