I’m delighted to announce another strong set of figures for The Spectator. It’s still a pretty tough market out there for magazines but today, we’re reporting a headline print ABC that’s actually up on last year: 62,684 in the first half of this year. Add digital subscriptions, which rose by 24 per cent, over the year, and our circulation has passed 70,000.
The website goes from strength to strength: over the last year, monthly pageviews have jumped by 59 per cent to 3.5 million year-on-year. The growth is bring driven my mobile platforms, with users up 114 per cent, and social media. Traffic from Facebook is up 120 per cent year-on-year; and it has now overtaken Twitter as our top referrer. Our website now has well over a million people a month, meaning that more people read Spectator articles now than any point in our 186-year history. Which is, in turn, driving sales.
Where once people might have stood in a newsagent and flicked through the pages of a magazine before deciding to buy, today they use social media as a news source and click on articles that take their interest. They may come for one article, then discover a few more – and then discover that The Spectator is by some margin the funniest, most entertaining magazine and well worth subscribing to. In this way, Twitter and Facebook have become the new newsstand; social media now accounts for 44 per cent of our referrals.
And finally, I’m delighted to announce that The Spectator has launched on Flipboard, and I’d like to thank its superb team for working with us on this. All our magazine and digital content is now available via the Flipboard app. We are also launching a range of exclusive Flipboard magazine collections, curated with our readers in mind. Topics include the Middle East and the Battle for Scotland, and individual magazines can be accessed for free via the Flipboard app. Flipboard users are warmly invited to follow us by clicking here.
Our strategy to win readers at The Spectator is pretty simple: if we publish the most original writing in the English language, then people will subscribe. There have never been more ways to do so: on iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Android – and a magazine that you can read in the bath. To try us out for just £12 for three months’ full access click here.
This article is free to read
To unlock more articles, subscribe to get 3 months of unlimited access for just $5
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in