The morning market is down 4% or 28,000 copies with the Irish Independent and half sibling, The Irish Daily Star, accounting for a good deal of that. In general the year has not been good to the ‘red tops’ with that segment back nearly 10,000 copies year on year.
The Red Top market in 2005 was 305,000 copies per day and commanded a 45% share of the morning market. It’s now back to 264,000 a day and a 40% share. Not to type cast the red top market too much, but they have been in decline in concert with the decline in the construction industry since around 2005 .
| 2008 | 2009 | Diff | Diff | ||
| Jan/June | Jan/June | ‘000 | % | ||
| Irish Independent | 159,363 | 152,204 | -7,159 | -4% | |
| Irish Times | 118,259 | 114,488 | -3,771 | -3% | |
| Examiner | 54,191 | 50,346 | -3,845 | -7% | |
| Irish Daily Star | 109,413 | 102,880 | -6,533 | -6% | |
| Daily Mirror | 64,427 | 64,525 | 98 | 0% | |
| The Sun | 99,646 | 96,683 | -2,963 | -3% | |
| Daily Express | 3,361 | 3,259 | -102 | -3% | |
| Daily Telegraph | 3,479 | 3,188 | -291 | -8% | |
| Financial Times | 4,768 | 4,152 | -617 | -13% | |
| Guardian | 4,744 | 4,524 | -220 | -5% | |
| The Independent | 2,201 | 1,904 | -297 | -13% | |
| The Times | 3,439 | 2,924 | -516 | -15% | |
| Daily Mail | 54,338 | 52,227 | -2,111 | -4% | |
| Total Morning | 681,629 | 653,304 | -28,325 | -4% |
No gains here with all the papers showing losses. The Irish Times loosing 3% and the Examiner dropping 7%. Could the readership research been correct after all? Two points to note in the Irish Independent figure.
Firstly like its sister Sunday it’s also carrying a bit of padding, 17,000 copies to be precise. It means that 128,000 or only 87% of their circulation every day is bought at the basic cover price. The compact edition of the Independent now accounts for about 62% of the papers sales (bought at basic cover price) around 81,000 and roughly the same as last year. B
ack some 28,000 but hasn’t fallen back to pre 2000 levels. Still, in terms of revenues, the morning market dropped a clean €24m in the year.
