In addition to local and regional newspapers, there are ten daily and nine Sunday national newspapers published in the United Kingdom. In an average week, 73.5 million newspapers are distributed: 31.4 million are local/regional, while the remaining 42.1 million are national. This equates to a total print advertising budget of PS1.4 billion. Around 5% of adults in the UK do not read any newspaper.
The UK has the second-largest newspaper market in Europe after Germany. In 2016, the total circulation was 3.9 billion copies, with 150 daily and 720 weekly titles operating within the country. Newspaper sales revenue in 2015 was £3.5 billion.
There have been declines in readership among some newspaper brands over recent years, but overall newspaper consumption is stable or increasing. The number of people reading newspapers online has increased significantly since 2004, when just 5 million people were doing so. Today, this figure is around 23 million.
According to the Office for National Statistics, about 10% of adults in Britain are non-readers of newspapers. This is equivalent to approximately 2.35 million people.
Non-readers are defined as individuals who have never bought a daily newspaper at all, nor picked up a Sunday paper during the past year. They may still receive printed copies of certain magazines (such as Vanity Fair) and some websites (such as the BBC) but these are generally only read by those who are interested in the topic.
In the United Kingdom, no major newspaper sold more than one million copies each day, since customers bought less often during the lockdown. Prior to the coronavirus, newspapers were already experiencing declining print sales, and tales concerning the steady collapse of newspapers have been widespread in recent years. However, even with sales falling, most papers did quite well financially: according to research conducted by the Press Association, only 1 in 20 journalists was made redundant in 2018.
Now that life has returned to some degree to normal, people are buying newspapers again. On the first day after the lockdown ended, over 2 million copies of The Sun were sold, making it the best-selling paper in Britain. Other papers also saw huge increases in sales on this first day back at work: The Daily Telegraph sold 3 million copies, The Times 8 million, and The Guardian 2 million.
Daily newspaper sales are expected to rise by up to 30% as people look for news and information about how they can break out of the quarantine lifestyle. However, these figures may not last since people are buying fewer daily copies than before the pandemic.
According to the Office of National Statistics, newspaper sales declined by 11.4% in 2019, the second largest drop since records began in 1950. Overall, newspaper sales have dropped by almost half since their peak in 2003.
In 2018, the anticipated total daily newspaper circulation in the United States (print and digital combined) was 28.6 million for weekdays and 30.8 million for Sundays, down 8% and 9%, respectively, from the previous year. Weekday print circulation fell by 13%, while Sunday print circulation fell by 13%. The number of daily papers published in the United States is shrinking; since 2005, when there were an estimated 1,626 daily newspapers, that number has dropped by 95 to a current estimate of 1,531 newspapers on June 12, 2018.
The number of printed newspapers has been declining for several decades. In 1990, there were an estimated 1,662 daily newspapers published in the United States; by 2000, that number had fallen to 1,410 daily newspapers. In 2017, it was reported that only 334 dailies are published in the United States. The report also indicated that more people are turning to online news sources instead.
There are several factors contributing to the decline of newspapers including but not limited to: increased use of online news sources, such as Google News, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit; decreasing costs of printing paper newspapers; and changing patterns of reading interest. It is estimated that if these trends continue, then by 2022 there will be only one remaining daily newspaper published in the United States: The Los Angeles Times.
Top 8 Circulation Newspapers in the U.K.
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