97% of Australians continue to consume news: ThinkNewsBrands, Roy Morgan
The latest release of Total News readership shows a slight softening for news consumption, down 0.5% with 20.6 million Australians continuing to consume news in a four-week period.
The readership figures, produced by Roy Morgan for ThinkNewsBrands, refer to the 12 months to September 2022 and shows that Total News reaches 97% of the population over the age of 14. Total News represents all news brands across print and digital as well as standalone news websites.
News readership is largely digitally driven with 19.6 of the 20.6 million readers engaging with news in digital channels each month. Less than 5% of Australians read news solely in printed format. This is reflected in the September readership figures. While print has seen a 12.2 per cent decline in readership, due to the skew to digital news consumption, overall readership has dipped by just 0.5%.
ThinkNewsBrands general manager Vanessa Lyons said: “The Total News readership data continues to demonstrate that news has a greater reach and frequency than many people think. It is important information for agencies and advertisers providing a holistic view of the size, capability and common strengths of news for their audiences.”
Demographically, Total News continues to engage all age groups including younger audiences with 96 per cent of Australians under the age of 40 reading news each month.
Australia’s trusted masthead brands continue to command large audiences, as demonstrated by the below table.
This is the first readership release following the re-engineering of Roy Morgan’s digital audience measurement data which has been updated from July 2020 onwards. The digital data now calls on a broader set of inputs while the algorithm to calculate the digital audiences has been refined.
The recalibrated digital audience data feeds into Total News to present the most accurate view of audience performance and unique audience profiling. Data can be compared year-on-year without a trend break.
Source: Roy Morgan Research, All People 14+. All audience data is based on the last 4 weeks averaged over the 12 months to September 2022.
Total News is defined as Australians aged 14+ reading news in print and/or news in digital. Digital news includes Australian publishers’ news websites/apps, Apple news and non-Australian-owned news. It also includes ABC news and Google news.
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Vanessa Lyons
These reach and frequency numbers are very distorted, by click throughs from the likes of tweets for say a Herald Sun article that are then behind a paywall and and people bail out, not reading the article. These are not genuine click-throughs imo and exaggerate the level of engagement – they may be impressions just, but not representative of true consumer behaviour
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