Abc

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.

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.

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 with an iPad.

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 now overtaken Twitter as our top referrer.

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 Spectator is the (as Graham Greene put it) the best-written weekly in the English language.

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 target of 100,000.

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.

The Spectator’s sales figures are out today, with digital sales included for the first time. I'm pleased to report that, in a pretty murderous market, our sales are still rising — and, thanks to our new digital readers, rising at the fastest rate in ten years. The red line shows our print sales. It’s not exactly boom times for the printed word. Some publications have resigned themselves to terminal print decline, and have switched their focus entirely to digital. That’s not the way we see it at The Spectator, the oldest magazine in the English language. We love the printed magazine, which is why two years ago, we refreshed its design. Since then, print sales have stabilised, and even grown in the first half of this year.