Sun on Sunday faces a big battle for readers

I note my learned colleague’s blog from yesterday and his cautious optimism for the Sun on Sunday’s success, but I think it is worth taking a rather more sceptical view. Veteran Fleet Street watchers, like Roy Greenslade, have declared that Rupert Murdoch has pulled a rabbit out of the hat, simultaneously getting Sun journalists back on board after talk of mutiny in the ranks and reinforcing his commitment to UK newspapers.

I’m not so sure. It could equally argued that this is a short-term fix designed to appease the Sun mutineers rather than a real commitment. However, I can see the business logic in narrow UK terms, in that the new paper has the potential to do ‘massive numbers’ (as media planners are quick to tell us) and Murdoch needs a big selling ‘Sunday’ to bankroll his other loss-making UK newspapers.

But, and this is the crux, strong interest from advertisers does not always turn into strong sales and readership. Despite lots of positive vibes coming from media planners and News International, I still think it is going to be an uphill battle to get the British public to go out and buy in big numbers.

Firstly, it is going to be very difficult to get back all of the NOTW’s 2.6 million readers in an overall market for Sunday newspaper reading which is in decline. In August 1991 national Sunday newspapers collectively sold an average of 16.2 million copies. By August 2001 this number had reduced to 13.6 million. By August of last year it had fallen it had fallen off a cliff to a mere 8.3 million.

What’s more, circulation figures from last year suggest that, as my learned colleague notes, that more than a million NOTW buyers appear to have vanished into thin air. They did not switch allegiance to the Sunday Mirror or The People or The Mail - they just left the market entirely.

Secondly, reaction from competitors is likely to be brutal in terms of price-cutting and other incentives, as those titles which benefited from the closure of the NOTW attempt to hang onto their gains. News International will launch with huge promotional activity, but all of this eats into profits and cannot be sustained over the long-term.

Finally, there is one other issue which is going to make life difficult for this successor to the ‘Screws’. The NOTW made its name exposing the antics of the rich and famous, but we now live in an era of super-injunctions which can stop an invasion of privacy in its tracks. What’s more, the newspaper industry is fully aware that the Leveson Inquiry is on-going and is on its best behaviour. It will take a very brave editor indeed to splash a typical NOTW scandal story, of the type that made its predecessors name, in the opening weeks of this new venture.

News International will be very gung-ho about this weekend’s circulation figures regardless of what happens, but the real proof will come in March, April and May as the market begins to settle down again. I’m no media buyer, but I suspect with a print run of three million, News International will be hoping for an opening weekend north of NOTW’s final circulation figure of 2.6 million. That is an awfully tall order to sustain once the initial excitement wears off.

Just how will The Sun set this Sunday?

So, the empire strikes back! Just when his back was against the wall, the old devil finds his elixir and comes out all guns blazing. What chutzpah! 

Yes, for those of you that haven’t heard, there is a ‘new’ Sunday tabloid in town (although how ‘new’ is probably up for debate). Media oligarch Murdoch has given an octogenarian’s last throw of the dice in what’s been a turbulent 12 months and announced the Sun’s highly anticipated Sabbath day edition. News Corps’ Sunday saviour will be hot off the press this weekend.

It might be worth comparing at this point, Murdoch’s bullish announcement that the Sunday Sun was on its way with that doddery appearance before the select committee last July. But alas, this is just an aside and I shan’t begin to assess Murdoch’s flourishing acting career. The real issue at hand is will the Sun on Sunday be the rip-roaring success it is being hyped up to be?

Inspecting the numbers, probably yes. It would appear that the News of the World's demise weakened the market overall. Of the News of the World's 2.67m sales, 1.3m simply disappeared. Half the rest went to the Sunday Mirror; the rest were split between the Daily Star Sunday and the People. Initial gains by the Mail on Sunday were rubbed out, although the Sunday Express made a little progress. Clearly media tycoon Murdoch has seen an opportunity to regain market leadership.

On the other hand however, and I could be wrong here, I’d imagine that a lot of the NOTW’s readers also turned more predominantly to online – real-time gossip from the glittering twitterati perhaps? It’s not just an online liberal coffeehouse you know! Similarly, the MailOnline hasn’t been doing too badly either.

Still, based on the numbers, the Sun’s promotional power and Murdoch’s resilient, death defying nature, I’d expect the Sun on Sunday to do rather well. There are more long-term issues at hand of course, like the growing revenue threat of social media and online news, and also the very necessary decontamination of News Corps’ brands.

As a PR person, I welcome the news of a Sun on Sunday and hopefully a revived Sunday newspaper market, but how long will it last in this form? When will social news become a genuine threat to traditional media’s revenue stream? I might be inclined to argue that it already is. As far as I can see, Twitter may not have pointless helpings of page three nudity, but this can be sourced elsewhere on the net, as Charlie Broker remarked last week, “on pages three to three billion and three.” 

This all leaves me thinking; in the long-term, will the Sun on Sunday not just be a bit outdated?