The Celtic Fan Media is not without its faults but the numbers don’t lie and across numerous website, podcasts and You Tube channels the demand for the supporter created output continues to rise. Put simply the Celtic Fan Media is thriving.
It looks like being a Good Friday for Celtic with perhaps as many as three players likely to be signing before pre-season training gets going at Lennoxtown on Monday morning for some of the players at least.
Celtic will continue to offer full access to the mainstream media, including for example titles like Daily Record, Sunday Mail and Sunday Post.
Celtic v AZ Alkmaar – Photo Andrew Milligan
The club started to work with the fan media at the start of last season and can’t be dissatisfied with how thing panned out and fan media were also much better at covering the Celtic FC Women side and the Celtic B team last season than the mainstream media.
The access given to the mainstream media, including the three newspapers mentioned, remains consistent even when their circulations are in dramatic decline. Look at it this way, since Celtic opened the doors to fan media last summer these three newspapers have lost between 15% to 21% of their entire audience!
The latest circulation figures from ABC are now displayed on trade website Press Gazette.
Daily Record’s circulation (number of copies sold or given away) is down year-on year 15% to 71,908.
Sunday Mail’s circulation is down 17% to just 69,923, year-on-year.
And Sunday Post’s circulation is down an incredible 21% year-on-year to just 51,298.
The Scotsman – who report on a bi-annual basis, rather than monthly, in the period July to December 2021 had a circulation of just 9,852.
And if you think we are picking on these mainstream media titles then it has to be noted that they at least report their circulation via the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) while so many of their competitors, including Scottish Sun, The Herald and Glasgow Times these days do not.
The Glasgow Times (formerly Evening Times) and The Herald last reported their circulation figures to ABC in the period July-December 2018 while The Sun last reported on March 2020.
Celtic v AZ Alkmaar -Photo Andrew Milligan
Some of these newspapers used to sell well over a millions copies every Sunday but those days are long gone.
Of course some of these publications have vibrant websites which in most cases will be driven by football content. The one thing they all have in common is that they need Celtic more than Celtic needs them, although it’s hard to see much evidence that Celtic have figured this out.
