ABCs: Digital growth for Fairfax and News but from low numbers

News Limited and Fairfax Media are continuing to grow their digital sales, but from a low base, data released to coincide with the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ latest numbers suggests.

Using the approved ABC methodology, The Australian has 31,241 paying digital subscribers, most of whom have paid for the Digital Pass, which gives them access to it on the web, mobile and via the tablet edition.

This marks a growth of 16.4% on six months ago when its numbers were first released. Under ABC methodology, the last set of digital numbers for The Australian, dating back to March, were 26,829.

A further 10,000 or so subscribers to the print edition of the newspaper have a complementary digital pass. In addition “several hundred” people buy a digital replica of the print edition, News Limited said.

According to Fairfax Media’s quarterly audience report on the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, it is also growing its digital reach. Fairfax has a different model with its tablet apps currently free.

The SMH tablet app has been downloaded 464,528 times to date, and is averaging 45,736 daily browsers. The Age has had 428,548 downloads and is averaging 43,166 daily browsers.

The SMH is averaging 56,113 sales per day of its digital replica edition, while The Age is doing 31,502.

Tim Burrowes

Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.

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topics Fairfax Media Sydney Morning Herald tablet The Age The Australian

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Comments: 2

Chris Keall 9 Nov 12

How many print subscribers does the Australian have?

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John Grono 9 Nov 12

It’s a good question Chris, and it’s actually a really hard one to accurately answer. Many newspaper subscriptions are sold at the local newsagent level as well as directly from the publisher. While we can get good records from some paper-sellers we can’t from others. Of course digital and packaged digital & print are sold by the publisher (or agreed third parties) so we can track the sale (or more accurately – the payment). Part of the delay of the release of digital sales, packaged sales etc was that not all the publisher/third-party internal systems were ready and compliant for audit – hence the one year optional reporting period of grace.

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