Sunday newspapers in Scotland are still enjoying a sales boost following the demise of the News of the World, in July, with most of the tabloid and middle-market titles witnessing substantial year-on-year rises – according to the latest set of circulation figures.
The Daily Star of Scotland – Sunday and the Sunday Mail were joined by the Sunday Mirror, The People, the Scottish Sunday Express and the Scottish Mail on Sunday in seeing their sales in Scotland go up between September last year and last month – according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation. Only the Sunday Post – from that crop of titles – saw a year-on-year drop and, even then, only by less than a 1,000 copies, from an average 225,013 during September last year to 224,125 last month.
However, across the daily titles, it was, once again, a picture of uniform year-on-year declines, with no title bucking the trend. The top-selling dailies – The Scottish Sun and the Daily Record – registered average figures of 314,084 and 270,032 respectively last month, some 7.5 per cent and 8.2 per cent down, again respectively, on 12 months previously (where the figures were 339,586 and 294,250).
The year-on-year figures for Scotland on Sunday and the Sunday Herald were drops of 12.2 per cent and 31.8 per cent (in SoS's case: from 53,267 to 46,778; in the Sunday Herald's: 42,601 to 29,050). For their daily counterparts, The Scotsman and The Herald, the figures read: a drop of 8.2 per cent for the former (down from 42,425 to 38,924) and a drop of 12.2 per cent for the latter (down from 53,122 to 46,620).
The year-on-year increases were: Daily Star of Scotland – Sunday (102 per cent, from 28,975 to 58,609), the Sunday Mail – the biggest-selling newspaper in Scotland (3.6 per cent, from 356,313 to 369,053), the Sunday Mirror (94.7 per cent, from 22,571 to 43,947), The People (86.9 per cent, from 14,353 to 26,821), the Scottish Sunday Express (25.1 per cent, from 36,184 to 45,272) and the Scottish Mail on Sunday (0.7 per cent, from 99,796 to 100,502).
The relatively-recently launched i daily newspaper enjoyed an average 12,641 sales in Scotland last month. And sister title, the Indepdent on Sunday, saw its sales in Scotland increase from an average 6,255 in September last year to 7,097 last month: an increase of 13.5 per cent.
