NST now a kid’s paper, sells below 90,000
By uppercaise
Now it’s official: New Straits Times circulation has dropped to just above 80,000 copies a day in sales to the buying public two years running. The official daily circulation figure remains above 100,000 but a quarter of that figure comes from bulk sales.
The decline of the NST has long been the subject of public debate, but the Audit Bureau of Circulation report for 2009 makes it beyond doubt: ABC now includes a breakdown of the bulk sales component.
Regular blog commenter nstman will be pleased. The ABC figures bear out his comment last year that NST had fallen well below 90,000.
Bulk sales at wholesale price — minus the news vendors’ commission of as much as 40% (split between the distributor and the news agent) — are made mostly to companies who sponsor copies of the New Straits Times to be distributed free to school children, or sold to schools at wholesale price for school children, or to institutions such as hotels which provide a copy of the newspaper in guest rooms.
The NST is thus riding on a big chunk of charity — a lot of the bulk sales go to government companies like CIMB bank and Telekom and politicians who give copies of the NST to be used as English-language teaching aids in schools.
Bulk sales are more important to the NST than to any other newspaper.
NST management will probably see the figures as vindication of their marketing strategy and their big Spelling Contest, to push into schools and catch future readers at a young age.
But what it means in practical terms is that one in five NST readers is really a kid. Now the real test will come in a couple of years when those kids who grew up with the NST in the classroom go out to work. Will they still remember the NST fondly? Or will they remember it as part of the torture they went through in school and thus switch to the Sun (it’s also free) or the breezy Metro for a change?
Read more at: http://uppercaise.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/newspapers-lose-sales/
