Overall Daily Circ Dives Again this Spring; Online Readership Grows

By: Jennifer Saba Overall daily circulation dropped 2.5% to 45,414,979 copies while Sunday circulation fell even more, at 3.1% to 48,504,484, according the Newspaper Association of America.*

The NAA analyzed the 770 daily papers and 610 Sunday papers reporting in the Audit Bureau of Circulations FAS-FAX for the six-month period ending March 2006.

The NAA attributed the decline in circulation due to publishers? decision to focus on home delivery and retention programs that result in less subscriber turnover. ?Newspapers are implementing circulation marketing strategies that deliver the most value to advertisers and make economic sense,? NAA President/CEO John Sturm said in a statement.

While the circulation numbers may seem bleak, the industry is moving toward the metric of total audience, which takes into account not only the print product but Web traffic as well.

Newspaper Web sites hit record levels in Q1, according to the NAA, with more than one in three of all Internet users visiting a newspaper Web site over the course of a month.

Newspaper Web sites averaged 56 million users, or 37% of all online users during Q1. That represents an 8% rise in reach compared to the same period a year ago. Of the nearly 112 million people who visited news and information Web sites, 58% turned to an online newspaper.

Newspaper Web site data is supplied by Nielsen//NetRatings.

?Both circulation and readership are important, valid measures of the newspaper audience, but counting only the number of units sold on a given day obscures the actual use of newspapers and consumer exposure to advertising,? said Sturm in a statement. ?Our continuing discussions with the advertising community and the third party research we have seen, tell us that audience is important to advertisers because it provides a more accurate measure of newspapers? total reach.?

*Originally, this story reported that overall daily circulation dropped 2.6%. That number was a mistake, as ABC had misreported the Baltimore Sun?s 2005 Monday through Friday average. The revised numbers bring the overall drop down to 2.5%.