In February the i reported a sales hike of almost a third over the previous month, with circulation reaching 175,714. But this dropped in March to 171,415, today's figures show.
In a statement the Independent said the decrease followed a month which had the benefit of "a sustained TV advertising campaign".
It added that "thousands of people" have downloaded i through their iPad in March, with an average of nearly 1000 per day across the month.
The biggest decrease within the morning newspaper sector was reported for the Daily Star, of 2.68 per cent, which also took the title below 700,000 for its average daily circulation.
Every audited UK national newspaper in the report experienced a year-on-year drop in circulations, the biggest recorded by the Sunday Herald at 27.51 per cent. The Scottish title also had the biggest month-on-month decrease at 5.92 per cent.
Overall Sunday titles performed worse than morning titles month-on-month, with an average decrease of 1.68 and 0.81 respectively. Three quarters of the audited papers recorded month-on-month declines.
Key figures
The first figure in each category below denotes average net circulation for March 2011. The figure in brackets is the month-on-month percentage change for the average net circulation between February and March and the third figure shows the year-on-year percentage change between March 2010 and March 2011.
Morning papers:
Popular: 4,985,623 (-0.81) -7.89
Mid Market: 2,660,347 (-1.26) -3.28
Quality: 2,161,075 (-0.27) -0.11
Total average: 9,807,045 (-0.81) -4.99
Sunday papers:
Popular: 4,864,686 (-1.99) -8.64
Mid Market: 2,733,420 (-1.40) -4.42
Quality: 2,050,463 (-1.32) -7.16
Total average: 9,648,569 (-1.68) -7.17
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