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June 2, 2016

NRS readership figures: Daily Mail/Mail Online grows UK monthly audience to 29m

By Dominic Ponsford

The latest national press readership figures from NRS suggest the Daily Mail is still by far the most read national newspaper brand in the UK in print and online.

The figures use data from the National Readership Survey to give a monthly average print reach figure for the 12 months to the end of March.

They then combine that figure with data from Comscore for March 2016 to come up with a figure for combined monthly reach across print and digital for the various titles.

The Daily Mail/Mail Online remains the most read national newspaper in with a claimed monthly reach across print and online in the UK of more than 29m, slightly up quarter on quarter.

The Sun dropped its online paywall in November last year. That month Comscore said its website reached 1.8m readers a month on desktop computers and  2.3m a month on mobile.

In March this year, Comscore gave The Sun 2.8m readers per month on desktop and 2.9m per month on mobile, a big enough increase to cancel out print decline.

The Sun however remains in seventh place in the NRS chart. Pre-paywall it was the UK’s most-read national newspaper brand in print and online, according to the NRS.

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The Sun is expected to relaunch its website in the next week or so.

Overall, the figures show mobile is by far the most important online platform for news providers in the UK.

Mail Online reached 20m readers a month on mobile in the UK in March 2016 according to Comscore, versus just under 9m on desktop computers.

The figures provided by NRS do not include Sunday titles.

UK ‘newsbrands’ readership for year to March 2016 compared with 2015 total (source NRS)

Title Net print, PC and mobile Total Total print April to March 2016 Total PC March 2016 Total Mobile March 2016 Net print, PC and mobile  2015 Total PC Nov 2015 Total mobile Nov 2015
Daily Mail / dailymail.co.uk 29455 10072 8735 20229 28870 9033 19348
The Guardian / theguardian.com 24151 4030 8227 18887 24710 8822 18287
Daily Mirror / mirror.co.uk 22912 5949 4956 16757 26116 5339 19400
The Daily Telegraph / telegraph.co.uk 22492 3848 7665 16380 26274 9100 19115
Metro / metro.co.uk 17960 10487 2190 9444 20220 2738 11900
The Independent / independent.co.uk 17493 2336 4532 13907 19375 5262 14718
The Sun / thesun.co.uk 14439 10955 2770 2919 13750 1782 2330
Daily Express / express.co.uk 11123 2753 2561 7122 11412 2503 7289
London Evening Standard / standard.co.uk 10511 5239 1705 6038 9980 1851 5102
Daily Star / dailystar.co.uk 7447 2538 1062 4565 6782 915 3883
The Times / thetimes.co.uk 5106 4473 436 551 5010 394 531
Daily Record / dailyrecord.co.uk 4527 1174 691 3527 3938 719 2763
The Scotsman / scotsman.com 1912 323 575 1250 1907 554 1225

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