NRS: More than 70% of The Independent's UK audience reads the title only on mobile

Some 73 per cent of those who read The Independent in the UK do so only from a smartphone or a tablet, according to data from the National Readership Survey released today.

This quarter's NRS-PADD results are the first to assess The Independent's readership after the title stopped publishing its print edition in March.

Results from the previous period pointed to a 63.8 per cent share of mobile-only audience, showing a considerable rise of almost 10 per cent according to the latest report.

Some 21.1 million people in the UK now read The Independent, of which 15.4 million only do so on mobile.

The Independent's audience has long been a majority mobile-only one. The title doubled the size of its digital team in May and announced a renewed focus on data journalism.

"If you want to be talking to people on a mobile platform, you need to find ways of talking about complex news stories that work on small screens, and numbers are really effective for that," editor Christian Broughton told Journalism.co.uk in May.

Elsewhere, the number of people who access news brands on mobile devices but not on desktop or in print is on the rise again, after stagnating slightly.

The Guardian has the second highest share of mobile-only audience, with 58.8 per cent of its 27.6 million total readers in the UK – up from 55.7 per cent previously.

Closely following the Guardian are The Telegraph, The Daily Mirror and The Daily Express, with NRS reporting around 57 per cent mobile-only readers for all three.

Results from the previous period put The Telegraph's mobile-only audience at 53.48 per cent, The Daily Mirror at 55.3 per cent, and The Express at 53.76 per cent.

Digital audience numbers are also on the rise, and while The Independent now stands out with a 100 per cent digital audience after the closure of the paper, The Guardian continues to lead the others with 96.6 per cent (up from 95.1 per cent), followed by The Telegraph with 93.93 per cent (up from 91.79 per cent).

The only title to show a drop in its share of digital readers as part of its total audience is The Sun.

Despite efforts to refresh the title's digital strategy going as far as to drop the paywall that previously surrounded the website, the latest NRS figures show The Sun's digital audience is currently 34.04 per cent, slightly down from 35.02 per cent.

The most read news brand in the UK remains The Daily Mail, with 30.6 million readers, of which 84.48 per cent access the title online.

The NRS-PADD report represents monthly audience estimates for mobile, and is created using NRS data from July 2015 – June 2016, integrated with comScore data from June 2016.

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