The study, which
examined reading patterns of 12 national newspapers’ between 2007 and 2011,
found that at least 96.7% of newspaper reading was physical rather than
on-screen.
In 2011, the
newspapers studied had an average domestic daily readership per print copy of
2.1m compared to a maximum of 709,559 online.The five quality/broadsheet newspapers studied were seen to have fared best in online popularity based on annual minutes spent reading and the number of usage sessions per day for each medium.
Non-charging websites of The Independent, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph were the most popular - up to 7% of the titles' total annual reading minutes. Of those that had established a paywall, the Financial Times got around 4.1% of their total annual reading minutes online, while website reading accounted for only 0.8% of access to The Times.
