NRS: At seven UK titles, more than half of the national audience reads stories only on mobile

Credit: Image by Eugenio Marongiu on Shutterstock

The share of mobile-only audiences, the readers who only come across a newspaper’s content on their mobile devices and not on desktop or in print, has become an important slice of the pie.

At seven UK newspapers, more than 50 per cent of the national audience only access stories from the titles on their mobile devices, according to the latest figures released by the National Readership Survey today.

The NRS PADD report shows The Independent has the largest share of mobile-only audience, at 78.41 per cent. The paper is exclusively read online nowadays, after famously shutting down its print publication in 2016.

The Daily Mirror (66.29 per cent), the Daily Telegraph (63.57 per cent), the Guardian (59.84 per cent), The Sun (57.63 per cent), The Daily Express (56.25 per cent) and the Daily Mail (54.52 per cent) also have a majority mobile-only readership.

The Metro (43.64 per cent) and The Times (25.12 per cent) are among the few titles that have not passed the 50 per cent mark according to the latest release.

Overall, The Daily Mail remains the most read newspaper in the United Kingdom with 31 million readers in print and digital, followed by The Daily Telegraph with 26.9 million and the Daily Mirror with 26.4 million.

The NRS report published today covers the period between July 2016 and June 2017. The figures are a blend of NRS and AMP print data, and due to different methodologies, cannot be compared with previous periods.

An incremental proportion of AMP data is published in each NRS release, with the first full publication of 100 per cent AMP figures to come in February 2018.

View the figures here.

If you're interested in exploring storytelling methods for mobile audiences, check out our upcoming newsrewired digital journalism conference on 22 November in London.

Free daily newsletter

If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).