Readership figures reveal surge in audience for Sunday Times, The West Australian and PerthNow

The Sunday Times is the best performing Sunday newspaper in the country and The West Australian and its website thewest.com.au as well as PerthNow have had massive growth in the past year, according to just-released industry data.

New figures from Roy Morgan and Nielsen collectively show how incredibly strong the past year has been for West Australian Newspapers.

It comes on the back of Seven West Media signing landmark journalism payment deals with tech giants Google and Facebook, with Google in particular singling out the original content from The West Australian as a significant part of its agreement.

Roy Morgan figures released yesterday show readership of The Sunday Times newspaper is up 39 per cent year-on-year – making it the best performing Sunday paper in the country.

The West Australian’s daily newspaper readership is also up 16 per cent. And the Saturday edition of The West Australian is up 6 per cent.

Not all newspapers saw growth in the past year according to the Roy Morgan figures.

Nine newspapers The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald were 30 per cent and 5 per cent respectively. The Australian Financial review is down 9 per cent compared to last year.

WAN editor-in-chief Anthony De Ceglie said the Roy Morgan figures came hot on the back of impressive Nielsen data on the performance of websites thewest.com.au and PerthNow.

The April figures showed a 24 per cent jump for thewest.com.au month-on-month and a 10 per cent jump for PerthNow in terms of unique browsers.

Combined the WAN sites boasted roughly 4.5 million users in April. Its nearest competitor WAtoday had 1.15m users.

The data revealed a dramatic month-on-month drop for The Australian who lost nearly one million unique browsers from March to April to be down 35 per cent month-on-month.

He said the figures were further proof WAN’s strategy to “hold the line” on print by putting out must-read newspapers seven days a week and “turbo-charging online” was working.

He said subscriptions for thewest.com.au paywall were tracking well above expectations thanks to a combination of breaking news and exclusive and special investigations like the seven-part video documentary Catching Lisa’s Killer about the mysterious death of Lisa Govan in Kalgoorlie.

“The West Live daily morning radio show hosted by Ben O’Shea is also proving very popular and a sign of bigger things to come,” he said.