Only three Scottish based newspapers submit monthly ABC reports – ABC is the Audit Bureau of Circulations – these are Daily Record, Sunday Mail and Sunday Post. We have been monitoring these numbers over the past decade or so and have watched as the numbers dropped month by month in what looked like an inevitable downward curve, almost like a plane’s flightpath as it approaches its destination.
A former colleague of mine, who left to join the Record about fifteen years ago, often talked about the atmosphere within the building as attempts were made to halt the decline and fall in the circulation numbers, with these always failing. The big fear was falling below the psychologically important figure of 100,000 ABC figure.
Today not only the Record, but it’s sister paper Sunday Mail and it’s rival Sunday Post would all bite your hand off to get anywhere near that 100,000 figure. The Sunday Mail and Sunday Post in years gone by used so sell copies in the MILLIONS so dropping below – well below 100,000 is quite incredible really.
The latest figures as appear on media industry website Press Gazette were posted yesterday for January 2021 and the year-on-year decline continues for all three newspapers mentioned.
Biggest loser of the three is the Sunday Post which reports a year-on-year drop of 17%, down to an average circulation of just 56, 041.
The Sunday Mail’s decline as also as bad, at 16% reporting an average circulation for January editions of 74,865.
Daily Record’s rate of decline on a year-on-year basis is currently at 12% and the average circulation in January is 75,696 copies per edition.
The official ABC figures shown on Press Gazette, do not show all the national newspapers that are on the newsstands. The figures do not include the Sun, Times and Telegraph which have all chosen to keep their ABC circulations private since the start of 2020. The Guardian and Observer joined them in September 2021.
Daily Record has a successful website, whereas the two Sunday papers haven’t really grasped that opportunity. Regional newspaper publisher Newsquest, which owns Herald and Glasgow Times recently launched clone-fan media sister sites Rangers Review and Celtic Way to look at capturing a share of a growing market and Daily Record, having previous launched than closed the Football Scotland website, recently brought it back, perhaps in response to Newsquest’s move into the fan media space.
Only huns buy the record , for they r fed Pish from more huns ,if you r printing for a one sided argument reap what u sow GOODBYE TO THE HUN MEDIA