Abc

Sales of The Spectator surge 16 per cent to (another) all-time high

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 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.

Sales of The Spectator: H1 2021

When the pandemic struck, we at The Spectator adopted the brace position. Like many publications, we furloughed staff and prepared for the worst. When subscription growth picked up, we became the first company in Britain to return the furlough money to the taxpayer and say we’d instead trade our way through the storm. Our last reported sales in 2019 were 83,000 (a record high) and we set a pretty big goal: to hit 100,000. I’m delighted to report that sales of The Spectator averaged 105,850 copies in the first half of this year, up 27 per cent on the first half of last year. Digital-only sales are popular but when new

Sales of The Spectator smash through 100,000

Sales figures for UK magazines are published today and The Spectator is delighted to announce the biggest increase in its 192-year history. The bet we made returning the furlough money last summer has paid off. When we packed up for lockdown last year, we feared the worst and furloughed staff. But we found the demand for our journalism had only increased. We were badly hit (newsagent sales and events especially) but saw we had a way out. In 2019, we sold an average 80,455 copies globally. We set a goal of hitting 100,000 (which would mean overtaking the weekday sales of two newspapers). We returned the furlough money to the taxpayer, and asked people who liked

Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: 2015 H2

The magazine industry publishes its sales figures today, and we at The Spectator are delighted to announce the largest figure in our 188-year history. And not just because digital sales are doing well: it’s growth on every front. Sales of the print edition of The Spectator are growing at their fastest rate for 15 years. Subscriptions, perhaps our single most important indicator, are up almost six per cent year-on-year. Our web traffic stands at a record high, with an average 1.9 million visitors per month last year, and is rising so fast that our standard monthly figure is now 2.5 million. Many of them are discovering The Spectator for the first time; many of them are getting hooked. And, in this way, the digital

Sales of The Spectator surge towards 100,000

When The Spectator returned furlough money during lockdown, we set ourselves a new target. Rather than take the taxpayer subsidy, we decided to try to grow our way of this mess by hitting sales of 100,000. For a magazine that finished last year averaging 83,020 weekly sales, it was ambitious. But in times of crisis, we thought, there should be a bigger demand than ever for original, thought-provoking and wide-ranging comment and analysis. The few days after our furlough announcement brought the largest sales increase in our history and the momentum has continued. I’m delighted to announce that we are now close to hitting that target, with sales averaging 96,817 in Q3

The Spectator’s sales hit an all-time high of 83,000

A few months ago, The Spectator became the fastest-growing current affairs magazine not just in Britain but in Europe. Magazine industry figures are out today and we’re delighted to announce that in the second half of last year, each issue of The Spectator sold 83,020 copies, up 8.9 per cent on the year. This is an average for the six months: the figure now is significantly higher. In April, we’ll become the first magazine in the history of publishing to print a 10,000th issue: we’ll do so with sales at an all-time high. What’s driving our success? We have the best writers – Rod Liddle, Matthew Parris and Charles Moore,

Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: 2013 H2

It’s that time of year again, where The Spectator‘s circulation figures are out – and our success continues. In October, I announced that we had more than one million unique visitors in a month. This week, we passed the 1.3 million mark with more than 3.2 million pageviews — something even I didn’t expect. Here’s how our analytics look: Interestingly, a quarter of our traffic now comes through social media. Another 26 per cent is from search engines, up from 20 per cent last year. Google, Twitter, Facebook and Flipboard are fast becoming the new newsagent – people can browse headlines, click what they like and discover for themselves that The

Sales of The Spectator: 2019 H1

We can today announce that The Spectator’s sales have hit another record high: 77,889 for the first half of this year, up 9 per cent year-on-year. Print subscriptions are growing at their fastest rate since 1995, but we’re recruiting new subscribers through digital means. We hear a lot about the decline of print, or even ‘subscription fatigue’, so ours is an unusual story. And one that I’d like to tell you about in more detail. The Spectator is the world’s oldest weekly, but its sales are at a 191-year high and growing fast. A typical new subscriber will today come to the magazine after reading our articles online (we have two million

Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: 2013 H1

The ABC circulation figures for The Spectator are out today. But they show only print sales which, in the digital age, are now just part of the story. Many of our readers are migrating to digital, especially our overseas subscribers who can now access The Spectator online and via the Spectator app on the same day as British readers. We have cut back a bit on overseas distribution, and the ABC print figure, published today, shows a 2.5 per cent decline for the first half of this year. But digital sales are up 25 per cent and together, print and digital come to 68,400. We will pass the 70,000 mark before the year is out, with a long-term

Sales of The Spectator: 2018 H2

The UK magazine industry releases its circulation figures today, and I’m delighted to announce that sales of The Spectator are at another all-time high. We sold an average 76,201 copies in the second half of last year, up by over 7 per cent on the first half of the year. Subscriptions are driving this growth: they’re now up 50 per cent over the last ten years – a figure that’s all the more remarkable given how bleak it has been for print media. Digital-only subscriptions are soaring – up 32 per cent in the second half of last year, compared to the first half. But not at the expense of

Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: 2012 H2

The Spectator’s sales figures are out today, and I thought Coffee Housers may be interested to know how things are going here in 22 Old Queen Street. It’s a tough time for print. Newsweek has now gone off to a digital afterlife and even The New Yorker is down 17 per cent on newsstand. As more readers change their habits – on Kindle and iPad – the Spectator has been changing too. The below chart shows how we’re getting on: The bit in blueshows the print sales, taken from our ABC certificates over the years. It does not include copies given away free, which I’ve never quite seen the point of.

Sales of The Spectator: 2018 H1

Sales of The Spectator broke through an all-time high three years ago, and we’ve kept growing ever since. The latest industry figures, for the first half of the year, are out today – and I’m delighted to say that it’s our best-ever start to any year. Our worldwide sales averaged 71,102 in the first half of this year, up 1,939 from the same period last year. I’d also like to share some other figures. Evening Blend, our daily newsletter, has now broken through 40,000 subscribers (you can sign up free to it here) and it’s growing fast, on account of it being the best evening newsletter anywhere. We offer it

Sales of The Spectator: 2017 H2

The magazine industry releases annual circulation figures today and the results for The Spectator are historic in two ways. First: our sales are at a record high, at 73,328, which is quite something for the world’s oldest weekly magazine. But we can today announce something I never thought I’d say: sales of the print magazine have now surpassed their 2006 peak to hit a new all-time high of 62,940. The Spectator celebrates its 190th birthday in July and will soon become the first weekly in history to print a 10,000th edition. Never in our long history have more people been reading (and, more importantly, buying) the print magazine. Our archivist,

Sales of The Spectator: 2017 H1

The UK magazine industry figures have just been published, and The Spectator has an extraordinary set of results to report. Our sales stand at the highest level in our 189-year history. We are not just the oldest weekly magazine in the world, but today’s ABC figures show that we’re growing faster than any comparable magazine with sales up 8 per cent year-on-year. The introduction of a paywall has not stopped our traffic hitting an all-time high. Our new podcast, Coffee House Shots, has released 100 episodes since the election announcement, with over 1.3 million listens. And this in a tough market. Newspaper sales have fallen by more than a third in the last

Sales of The Spectator: 2016 H2

UK print sales up 10pc in a year – fastest of any UK magazine or newspaper UK newsstand sales up 13pc. Growing popularity of digital/print bundle Last year, we revealed that The Spectator had broken its previous circulation record and was selling more copies than at any time in its 189-year history. That momentum has kept building and the figures we release today are nothing short of extraordinary: print subscriptions are up 9pc year-on-year. Print circulation is now rising at the fastest rate since 1989. To have sales at a record high is one thing: to have print circulation growing at the fastest rate for almost 30 years is quite another. There

Sales of The Spectator: 2016 H1

The UK magazine industry publishes its circulation figures today, and there is good news for The Spectator: the highest sales ever in our long and illustrious 188-year history. Our web traffic has hit an all time high: we broke 4m monthly unique users during the referendum campaign, which is quite something for a ‘paywalled’ publication. But traffic comes and goes. What matters is whether the new readers like what they see and, when they encounter the paywall, decide to join us. They are now doing so in record numbers. As a result our subscriptions are soaring. Our print sales figure now stands at 56,632 for the first half of this

Sales of The Spectator: 2015 H1

It’s a red-letter day for us here at 22 Old Queen Street. The latest circulation figures for British magazines have just been published and show that sales of The Spectator have broken through their all-time high. More people are buying the magazine now than at any time since we started publishing 187 years ago. Our last high was in the first half of 2006; since then, print publications have struggled to cope with the challenges of the digital age. Newspaper sales have fallen by 40 per cent and are falling still; ours bottomed out mid-2009. Different publishers have responded in different ways; some have full paywall, others no paywall at all. We

The hounding of Cardinal Pell: things Australia’s liberal media don’t want you to know

The attempt to implicate Cardinal George Pell in the Ballarat child abuse scandal is a virtuoso display of score-settling by Australia’s left-leaning journalists, who have hated Pell for many years. This morning, however, The Australian broke ranks by publishing a column by Gerard Henderson that helps set the record straight. I’m simply going to quote extracts from it because you can be damn sure that they aren’t going to penetrate the liberal Aussie media’s firewall. On Pell’s record in tackling child abuse: On all the available evidence, Pell was among the first Catholic bishops in the world to address the issue of child sexual abuse by clergy. He was appointed archbishop of

Sales of The Spectator: 2014 H2

The Spectator’s sales figures are out today, and our rise continues. The website’s traffic is up a remarkable 50 per cent year-on-year to 1.8 million monthly unique users and over 4.5 million pageviews. But the rise in digital is not coming at the expense of print sales, which are also rising – our sales in the UK are up 4pc over the last year – which, in a market down 4pc, is not bad going. Our print subscriptions stand at a five-year high and are rising all the time. So reports about the death of print have been exaggerated. A print magazine has inimitable advantages – you can’t curl up in the bath

Sales of The Spectator: 2014 H1

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