The Times podcast: Masters of Disasters: Broken records!
Posted by James Williams
24th of December (Friday)
The record breaking news at the Times this festive season was that the Times UK newspaper’s biggest ever Christmas Day sale was on their hard copies, including £22 bundles for 25 or 25 per bundle. The newspaper was, of course, also selling the eMagazine for £20 and The Times Extra (for £10) so, for a total of £44.95, readers could score the paper in a bundle for the week ahead.
On that day alone, the newspapers sold 5,000 copies on their newspaper stand at the Times Tower in London (there were only 3,000 copies on offer on their stand at the same time in the UK on Saturday).
They also sold 400 copies in their online editions on the day, selling on average 1,300 copies a day.
In the UK, and as was also the case when they put on sale their biggest ever issue to date, the Times’ online edition sold more than 1.5 million digital copies of the Sunday Mirror online edition during the week of Christmas, with over 200,000 readers subscribing.
That total is even more impressive when you think of what one man called the Daily Mail was selling before the Times sale, but it should be noted that the Mail is a single paper, the Times is a daily newspaper, and the rest of the UK’s Sunday tabloids would have sold at least 10 times more digital copies if they had put on sale their issue with no bundles.
So much for the theory that the big Sunday newspapers in the UK aren’t paying for what they get from websites, and that if they did it would affect their circulation numbers.
However, the Times was far from the only big newspaper to go onto the eMagazine and Extra.
The Mirror, for example, went on sale for £5.99 and sold 700,000 copies digitally on the