Advertisers wanting to target newspapers’ biggest circulation weekdays should go for Wednesdays or Fridays, new data on individual daily sales suggests.
Today sees the Audit Bureau of Circulation release the first data broken down to individual days of the week. Daily reporting becomes obligatory at the start of next year, and for this release, only News Limited has voluntarily participated.
While it is no surprise that Saturday is the best sales day of the week (apart for Sydney’s Daily Telegraph) there is more variation across weekdays.
Both The Australian and The Herald Sun in Melbourne fare best on Wednesdays, closely followed by Fridays.
The Adelaide Advertiser does best on a Friday, followed by Mondays.
The Brisbane Courier Mail and The Tele both do best on Fridays followed by Wednesdays.
The worst day of the week varies from paper to paper. Advertisers with flexibility over timing and sectional targeting might choose to avoid the Courier Mail on Mondays, The Advertiser and the Herald-Sun on Tuesdays, The Australian on Thursdays and The Tele’s Saturday edition.
Leaving Saturdays out of the equation, the paper with the biggest weekday variation is the Herald-Sun, with a gap of more than 50,000 between its Tuesday low and its Friday high.
However, no data is available for actually daily sales. The individual weekday numbers still remain averaged across the three month reporting period.
Meanwhile, the overall picture from newspapers was not pretty. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Monday to Friday sales fell by more than 7% to 189,803.
July-Sept quarter 2011 compared to 2010:
