The hotly contested election campaign appears to have given the broadsheets a fillip with all the quality titles except the Financial Times recording small month-on-month increases in circulation during April.
The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures show the Guardian, Times, Independent and i all increased their circulation during the month by about 0.7%, while the Telegraph was the best performer, increasing sales by 1.4%.
The Daily Mail also fared comparatively well during April, increasing its sales by 0.29% month on month to 1.63m. However, the Express saw its sales fall 1.7% to 437,553. Express owner Richard Desmond donated £1m to Ukip on 16 April.
In contrast, the Sun remained roughly stable, losing just a few hundred readers, while the Daily Star lost 1% of its sales, the Daily Record lost 1.6% and the Mirror saw a 1.8% month-on-month decline, the biggest monthly drop of any daily title. Between them, the papers sold more than 23,000 fewer copies in April.
The figures are a reversal of March, when the red-tops mostly saw small month-on-month increases in circulation, while all the broadsheets apart from the Times and the FT saw decreases.
Year on year, the picture was far bleaker for almost all titles with each seeing some degree of decline, though again the red-tops fared worse.
Sales of the Telegraph and Independent were down more than 6%, the FT was down 5.2% and the i down 3.9%. The Guardian saw the biggest year-on-year slide among the broadsheets, down 8.12%.
However, the Times continues to curb its print sales decline, falling just under 1% to 393,826. The Times’s decision to charge of online access and push print and digital subscriptions has helped the News UK-owned newspaper stabilise its print circulation.
In total, the broadsheets sold almost 80,000 fewer copies in April than they did a year earlier.
The Daily Mail’s sales fell 5.3% to just over 1.6m, but continued to outperform the Express, which saw sales fall more than 10%.
All the red-tops saw a decline of more than 10% except for the Mirror, which lost 9.1% of its circulation.
In total, the tabloids have seen sales slump more than 400,000 over the year.
The trend was broadly similar across the Sunday titles, with the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Times both increasing circulation by 2% or more month on month, and the Observer selling 1.2% more copies. However the Sunday Telegraph saw sales decline just under 1%.
In comparison, both the Sun on Sunday and the Sunday Mirror saw very small declines compared with March of less than 1%, while the Sunday People shed 1.8% of the sales it made in March. However, all the red-tops saw Sunday sales fall more than 10% year on year, with the Sun on Sunday the biggest faller, down more than 14% to lesss than 1.5m.
Meanwhile, the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Express saw 0.2% and 0.1% increases in circulation month on month, but big declines year on year. The Sunday edition of the Mail has shed 7.6% of its sales – more than 100,000 copies – since April 2014, while the Sunday Express was down 10% to 385,365.
