Sunday Sun sales flag say pollsters

Early estimates that the Sun on Sunday dropped 500,000 sales in its second week since launch could be down to disappearance of ‘souvenir hunters’ and curious buyers says Ipsos Mori, which has researched attitudes to the new Murdoch publication.

Sun on Sunday

Unverified early reports suggest the red-top saw a 17% drop in sales last Sunday (March 4).

News International chairman Rupert Murdoch claimed the launch edition shifted 3m copies, outpacing its predecessor The News of The World’s (NOTW) 2.67m weekly copies. Official sales figures measured by ABC will be revealed next month.

Just under half of adults (46%) say they had no views on the new red-top the Ipsos poll found. Nearly a quarter (22%) thought the launch was a good idea, but almost a third (32%) thought it wasn’t.

Around three in five (58%) of The Sun readers of Monday to Saturday copies were in favour of the new newspaper, as were two-thirds (66%) of former regular readers of NOTW.

For the latter, the figure fell from 74% prior to the launch to 63% after the launch, which may suggest that expectations of some former NOTW readers were not met, says Ipsos.

By comparison, overall seven in ten (69%) readers of the new Sunday edition of The Sun also thought the launch was a good idea.

“The new paper is clearly not a News of the World clone, which has possibly put off a relatively small number of those readers, but not the majority,” says Ipsos MediaCT director John Carroll.

“However I feel that the real industry focus for the future lies more with distributing and monetising digital content to prop up the underlying ad revenue decline,” he adds.

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