New data reveals The Australian bucked the trend with huge audience growth
The Australian has outperformed every major newspaper in the country, adding 232,000 new readers while rival mastheads hemorrhage audience numbers.
The country’s premier national masthead, The Australian, has enjoyed record growth over the past 12 months, with its cross-platform audience surging at a time when many other news titles are losing readers.
According to readership data released on Monday by Roy Morgan iris, The Australian outperformed every other major masthead across the nation in the year to September 30, attracting 232,000 new readers.
The Australian now has a total cross-platform audience of more than five million, while its main commercial rival, the Nine-owned Australian Financial Review, has just 3.29 million.
Nine’s flagship state-based mastheads, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, lost significant chunks of their cross-platform audiences over the past 12 months, with the SMH’s readership slipping by 7.3 per cent, and the Victorian title falling 1.1 per cent.
The worst-performing newspaper stable was WAN (West Australian Newspapers), which owns both major mastheads in the state, The West Australian and The Sunday Times. WAN’s combined print and digital audience crashed by 16.9 per cent (a loss of 773,000 readers) in the 12 months to September 30.
The growth in the digital audience of The Australian has been particularly strong, with demand for the masthead’s online content up 13.3 per cent year-on-year, compared to the AFR’s 2 per cent.
Digital readership of The Australian’s business section alone swelled 19.6 per cent in the past year. In print, both The Australian and The Weekend Australian enjoyed spikes in readership, growing 10.4 per cent and 4.2 per cent respectively over the course of the year.
The Australian’s dedicated Wealth section registered audience growth of 7.7 per cent, while readership of The Weekend Australian’s agenda-setting Inquirer section lifted 8 per cent.
Editor-in-chief Michelle Gunn said the masthead’s record cross-platform growth demonstrated the market’s desire for quality, trusted news sources.
“These very strong audience numbers reflect 12 months of powerful news-breaking and unrivalled analysis on the issues that are reshaping our nation, our region and the world,” Gunn said.
“The near 20 per cent growth in the digital audience for business is particularly pleasing. The team has produced some excellent investigations, exposing the feud at the top of Atlassian and scandals in the WiseTech and Super Retail Group boardrooms.
“The rich storytelling in our new wealth, health and culture verticals have also brought in many new subscribers.
“I want to thank our readers, old and new, for placing their trust in us.”
The Sunday Telegraph remains the most popular print newspaper in Australia overall, with an average of 697,000 readers per edition, closely followed by The Weekend Australian, which draws a print audience of 674,000.
The Herald Sun remains the most-read weekday newspaper in the nation, with an average audience of 513,000 (down 13.5 per cent), according to the Roy Morgan iris data.
Separate market research to be released on Monday by Ipsos iris reveals News Corp Australia (publisher of this masthead) reached four in five Australians online in October, with 18.22 million people visiting the company’s sites.
News Corp’s managing director and publisher of the company’s Free News and Lifestyle division, Pippa Leary, called out taste.com.au for delivering a deeply engaged Australian food audience at scale, saying: “This month, it tops the Lifestyle category with the highest audience and engaged reach as Australians turn to the site to help them start planning for the festive season.”
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