Total national, metropolitan and regional newspaper readership grew by 3.1 per cent in the 12 months to September 2005 to 12,166,000 people, while the weekly metropolitan TV audience fell by 3.2 per cent to 9,561,223.
The number of people reading newspapers continued to grow along with an increase in online usage. In the 12 months to September 2005, the total online audience grew by 6.9 per cent to 9,411,333 active users.
News Limited advertising director Ray Atkinson, says newspapers continued to win the competition for people’s attention. “We continue to produce vibrant publications that people want to read and that deliver the big audiences advertisers want to reach,” says Atkinson.
He said advertisers were realising that even top-rating TV programmes did not attract as big an audience as newspapers, with more people reading News Limited’s papers in the five capital cities (5,697,000) per week than watched the 2005 Australian Open men’s final (4,043,100), Australian Idol’s final verdict (3,344,183) or even the Dancing with the Stars Grand Final (2,399,516).
“People are time poor and as their lives become busier, they want to choose when to get their news and entertainment and newspapers and the Internet give them that flexibility,” he says.
Atkinson says highlights of the latest survey included the nine per cent increase in affluent readers, those earning more than $100,000 a year, for News Limited’s daily and weekend newspapers. The number of affluent households, those earning more than $130,000 a year, reading News Limited newspapers grew by 10 per cent.
Atkinson says while overall newspaper readership grew, the readership of News Limited newspapers dropped by 480,000 year on year, mainly due to falls in the Victorian market and at The Australian which were at odds with record-breaking circulation figures.
He says News Limited has again raised concerns with Roy Morgan research about problems with the survey methodology. The Australian Monday to Friday recorded its best circulation in its 41-year history, increasing sales by 2.9 per cent to 136,917 yet the Roy Morgan survey said its readership had fallen by 6.8 per cent, or 29,000 readers, to 396,000.
“Readership research in Victoria and Queensland is a problem and we have also raised a query with Roy Morgan Research over The Courier-Mail and the Townsville Bulletin in particular whose readership is not reflecting other key performance measures,” says Atkinson.
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