‘Irish Times’ has readership of 390,000

The Irish Times and irishtimes.com have a total daily readership of 390,000, according to the latest Joint National Readership Survey.

The print edition of the newspaper has a readership of 337,000, while irishtimes.com is read by 106,000 Irish adults on an average day.

Across an average week, some 776,000 Irish adults read The Irish Times or its supplements in print or online.

The survey, which covers the period from July 2012 to the end of June 2013, shows that 84 per cent of adults, or some 2,999,000 people, read some newspaper either in print or online.

Some 81 per cent, or 2,895,000 people aged 15-plus, read some print edition of a newspaper, with 58 per cent reading a daily print newspaper and 59 per cent reading a Sunday newspaper.

Research company Millward Brown, which conducts the survey for members of the National Newspapers of Ireland group, said 13 per cent of Irish adults, or 450,000, read some newspaper online.

The figures are based on the “average issue readership” of print newspapers and their websites, which is defined as “read yesterday” in the case of daily titles and “read in the past week” in the case of Sunday titles and weeklies.

Millward Brown, which carries out almost 7,000 interviews face-to-face in randomly selected households for the survey, changed its methodology last year so that respondents are now asked specifically about their online habits.

Print and online
Up until June 2012, when people were asked if they read a particular newspaper, it was up to them to interpret if the question referred to print or online. In this survey, all respondents were asked to separately detail their print and online consumption of the titles.

The report shows that the Irish Independent has a total combined readership – print and online – of 649,000, while its sister title, the Herald, has 315,000 readers.

The Irish Daily Mail's readership is 230,000 and the Irish Examiner's is 224,000. The Irish Daily Star has 391,000 readers, the Irish Sun has 344,000 and the Irish Daily Mirror has 274,000.

Sunday titles
The Sunday Independent has the largest readership of any title, with 938,000 readers. Among other Sunday titles, the Sunday World has 785,000 readers, the Sunday Times has 409,000 and the Irish Mail on Sunday has 354,000. The other titles included in the survey are the Irish Sun on Sunday (251,000), the Irish Sunday Mirror (181,000) and the Sunday Business Post (147,000).

When JNRS member titles are considered on their own, the report finds that 6 per cent of adults, or 199,000 people, are daily readers of the newspapers’ websites, while some 450,000 people, or 13 per cent of the adult population, read these titles online on at least a weekly basis.

Digital readership of newspaper titles increases sharply for the AB social group, among under-45s and in Dublin. For example, 30 per cent of people in the AB group read newspaper titles online on at least a weekly basis, while 17 per cent of people under 45 and 21 per cent of people in Dublin read the titles online at this frequency.

Half of the online readers of daily titles also read a printed newspaper on the same day, Millward Brown said, while there was also a high crossover of readers between the online editions of different titles.