Friday, September 28, 2012 –
• Mobile website daily use up 50 per cent
• iPad app daily use up 100 per cent
• iPhone daily app use up 500 per cent
• Combined digital/print circulation sales steady
The audience for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age continues to grow strongly, fuelled by the use of the mastheads’ news products on mobile devices.
Daily unique browsers of the websites on a smartphone are up more than 50 per cent, daily use of the iPad app editions is up 100 per cent and the daily use of iPhone apps is up more than 500 per cent on a year ago.
This growth takes the number of unique browsers to more than 300,000 per day for the mobile websites, to 90,000 a day for the tablet edition and to 18,000 per day for the iPhone app.
Fairfax continues to lead the way in not just mobile growth but also in the full and transparent reporting of it.
“We continue to lead the market in data transparency and are pleased that this demonstrates that our multi‐platform audience strategy is working,” Jack Matthews, CEO of Fairfax’s metropolitan media business said.
“We’re growing our audiences rapidly as we cater for every way our customers want to engage with our publications.”
“The growth in our mobile results continues to be fantastic and we clearly lead the market in the mobile news space.
“It’s worth noting that this growth is on top of steady combined digital/print circulation sales for August, compared with July – and we haven’t got any of our main digital products included in paid circulation yet.”
Those apps remain free during their introductory phase. Digital subscriptions covering all the SMH and Age publications will launch next year.
Daily mobile usage continues to expand
The use of the SMH and Age news products on mobile devices continues to lead the overall Fairfax metro audience growth.
The release of the latest version of the SMH for iPad and The Age for iPad apps has helped add another 8 per cent in daily usage month‐on‐month.
Daily use of the iPhone news apps has also been spurred on by the release of an updated version. The SMH version added another 4 per cent daily unique browsers during the month, while The Age added 7 per cent.
The audience for the masthead websites on smartphones continues to expand month‐on‐month:
smh.com.au was up 2 per cent in August to 199,175 and theage.com.au was up 4 per cent to 111,568 over the previous month.
Video streams & time spent on websites up
Video streams on our major masthead sites rose significantly in August in line with a busier period of news. The Age recorded the highest growth – at 10 per cent – to 3.8 million views for the month, while the SMH rose 4 per cent to 5.98 million for August, compared with July.
Reflecting the busier news month time spent on the main websites rose – the SMH and The Age both up 9 per cent.
Continued steady combined print/digital circulation sales The monthly sales results of our major brands is steady.
The combined print/digital sales of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun‐Herald in August were unchanged on July sales. Print sales month‐on‐month were stable, except for Saturday which was 1 per cent lower. Masthead combined print/digital sales were: weekday 188,235, Saturday 284,547 and Sunday 345,670.
The combined print/digital sales of The Age show continued growth in the sales of The Age digital replica edition, which rose more than 16 per cent in August against July after a subscription drive for that channel. Weekday combined print/digital sales were up 4 per cent, while Saturday fell 1 per cent and Sunday 3 per cent. Masthead combined print/digital sales were: weekday 178,044, Saturday 230,103 and Sunday 195,780.
The combined print/digital sales measure removes duplication of subscribers who receive both a newspaper and digital replica edition. Monthly reporting began in April so there is no corresponding data for last year. The monthly measure is consistent with the new total masthead sales rules of the Audit Bureau quarterly reports.
/ENDS
Enquiries:
Miranda Schuppan
Communications Director
Fairfax Metro Media
T: +61 3 8667 2661
M: 0409 256 764
E: mschuppan@fairfaxmedia.com.au
