I’m busy on election matters today, but the latest set of ABC figures have just arrived and I want to take time out to note one stand-out fact: the Sun’s dropping of Page 3 at the end of January does not appear to have made any discernible difference to its circulation.
In the month of March, the sales audit shows that it sold an average of 1,858,067 copies. That was a slight improvement on the month of February.
I never did think people bought the newspaper because it carried pictures of topless models every week day.
Similarly, I didn’t imagine that Sun readers would flock to the Daily Star because it still carries such photographs. And the circulation figures bear that out because the Star’s sale has remained stable over the last three months.
So why did it take the Sun so long to bow to the pressure to axe the pictures? I’d guess that it and its publisher, Rupert Murdoch, couldn’t bear to be seen “giving in” to the No More Page 3 campaigners and a petition signed by 243,000 people.
Murdoch had clearly been happy to see the end of the pictures years before, but he held back until the start of 2015 before ordering editor David Dinsmore (who was keen to do so) to drop them.
Anyway, the paper and its publisher eventually did the right thing. Then again, I don’t think it’s come over all feminist given its recent “cleavage week” and today’s page 3 content about Amanda Holden’s nipples.
