Richard Desmond’s move to spark a tabloid war by slashing the price of the Daily Star to 20p resulted in a UK sales boost of 23,000 copies on Monday. But the move did not hurt sales of rivals the Sun and Daily Mirror.
Unofficial figures for the first day of sales of the price war indicate that the Daily Star put on about 23,000 copies and grew UK sales by about 7% week-on-week.
The Daily Star’s overall sales figures put the circulation increase at 5.6%, however this includes Ireland where the price cut has not been introduced so is not a true reflection of the impact.
The move by Northern & Shell, which cut the price of the Daily Star weekday, Saturday and Sunday editions by 50%, has been positioned as an attempt to “inject some overdue sales and excitement” into the tabloid market.
While the Daily Star put on extra sales the move did not have an impact on rivals.
The Sun is thought to have seen sales rise about 3% on Monday, about a 50,000 rise, in part thanks to a Tesco token collect promotion.
And the Daily Mirror is thought to have risen marginally, perhaps 1%.
“It would seem that at least on day one the additional sales the Daily Star picked up have come from readers buying multiple newspapers, not shifting allegiance from one title to another because of the price cut,” said one senior newspaper executive.
Northern & Shell will need time to evaluate the impact of the price change – the 50% loss on cover price revenue could cost it as much as £400,000 a week depending upon how many additional sales were notched up.
“If nothing changes in terms of the scale of uplift of the Daily Star’s sales I’d give it a week or two before the price is put back up,” said a second newspaper industry executive.
Some observers believe that Northern & Shell may now be hedging its bets on whether to continue the price cut long term.
A TV ad campaign which launched on Sunday night said that the price cut was 20p making it “half the price of the Sun and we think it’s twice the fun”.
However, each day so far this week the Daily Star has been running with a much more ambiguous promotional line saying it is “20p every day this week”.
Retailers and newsagents were certainly led to believe it was a permanent change.
Trade body the National Federation of Retail Newsagents was outraged by the move, with about 50 deciding to stop stocking the Daily Star in protest at their margins per copy sold being cut in half by the move.
Standard practice is usually for newspaper publishers to maintain retailer margins for short-lived price cutting promotions.
