The UK magazine industry releases figures today and we’re delighted to announce that The Spectator sold a weekly average of 106,905 copies last year, up 16 per cent on 2020 and — yet again — our best year ever. The Spectator has now almost doubled our sales over a decade where sales of consumer magazines fell by two-thirds.
We can also announce:
- Our actual (print) magazine, which has the longest run of any weekly in the world, hit an all-time sales high averaging 77,564 sales last year. Just under a quarter of our subscribers are digital-only
- Our recently-launched Spectator TV has broken through 150,000 subscribers
- Coffee House Shots, our flagship daily podcast, exceeded a million listens in January
- Our website spectator.co.uk was viewed 75 million times last year
- Spectator World, our new US-based monthly (not included in these figures) hit 14,000 subscribers
- Fraser Nelson was last month named editor of the year in the British Society of Magazine Editors awards in its current affairs category
Our ABC certificate, released today, shows a total figure of 112,040 — so that includes those who first sign up on a free trial. But we judge ourselves on full-price sales: up 16 per cent year-on-year as we built on the base readers we recruited in the pandemic.
To put this in perspective, The Spectator now sells more copies than The Guardian. We’re not comparable publications, of course, but for generations sales of The Spectator have been tiny in comparison to newspapers. No longer.
And while almost a third of our sales are digital-only, most of our new subscribers choose print and digital bundle. This has transformed the prospects of print: we’re selling (far) more physical copies of the magazine than ever before giving our advertisers a bigger reach than ever.
Our columnists were our biggest traffic draw with Charles Moore, Lionel Shriver, Rod Liddle, Douglas Murray, Mary Wakefield, James Forsyth and Matthew Parris winning over more subscribers than ever.
A subscription to The Spectator now brings twice-daily news bulletins, as well as the best in analysis, books and arts. Isabel Hardman’s Evening Blend expanded its lead as Britain’s most-read daily politics email with 116,302 subscribers. Hot on its heels with 101,576 subscribers is Kate Andrews’ recently-launched Lunchtime Espresso. Both emails give a concise summary of the day’s news and are free to all but a major driver if subscriptions. Sign up here.
During the pandemic we developed The Spectator’s data hub, a free-to-use data library, which kept an eye on Sage models and many other things. We’ll be expanding it later this year to look at economics and the environment.
Our podcasts also had a record year with our flagship daily show, Coffee House Shots, breaking through a million listens last month. Our broadcast editor, Cindy Yu, saw her own Chinese Whispers join Americano, The Edition and Women With Balls in our most popular. It was reviewed by the Sunday Times last week as ‘not intimidating but enlightening and expansive. It goes high and low: expect analysis of Beijing’s treatment of the Uighurs, but also topics such as the Chinese love of drinking’.
Each edition of The Spectator is now followed up by an hour-long show on Spectator TV, hosted on YouTube: it has now broken through 150,000 subscribers. We’re much encouraged by the response and will be expanding the number of television shows as the year goes on.
It doesn’t seem so long ago that The Spectator was furloughing staff and fearing the worst — as so many other companies did. Our events business did take a hit. But soon as it turned out that lockdown would actually increase our sales, we were the first company in Britain to return the furlough money and said we’d trade our way back to recovery.
We’re still living in times of huge change, both in politics and in publishing. But whatever the future holds, The Spectator will face it in better shape than ever. For that, we know who to thank: our readers, new and old. And those thinking about joining us, why not take out a free trial? You can do so by clicking here.
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