The latest data from Roy Morgan shows:
- News Publishing’s total readership has grown to an incredible 21.7 million Australians aged 14 and over each month.
- News consumers are broad and intensely engaged: 64% read three or more categories of content each month and nine out of ten access up to four different titles.
- Despite the cost of living crisis, less than 1% of news readers stopped paying for access last quarter, underscoring readers’ stable and habitual relationship with the news.
- The entire news audience is valuable to advertisers: wealthy Australians are 28% more likely to read the news and paying news readers are 25% more likely to spend big.
The number of Australians who read the news is now astonishingly high.
Roy Morgan’s readership figures show that the news now reaches 21.7 million Australians aged 14 and over each month, with every profile group strongly represented. To put it in perspective, more Australians read the news each week than Australians drink coffee or milk, demonstrating how deeply ingrained news is in Australians’ lives. These huge readership figures show that advertisers can target virtually any audience they want through Total News Publishing.
Australians delve deeply and broadly into the subject matter and are interested in numerous titles and categories from news publishers.
Roy Morgan’s data shows how deeply and widely Australians interact with news, with 67 million interactions per week. 91% read up to four titles each month, and while general news remains the most read category with 93% of the population, there is also high readership in other categories. In fact, 64% interact with at least three categories in any given month. These figures highlight the diversity of content offered by news publications and the highly engaged and attentive audiences they offer advertisers.
Despite the cost of living crisis, Australians continue to pay for news.
Further analysis of Roy Morgan data shows that despite the cost of living crisis, less than 1% of news readers canceled their subscriptions last quarter. That’s an incredibly strong result. By comparison, according to data from the National Australia Bank, 37% of Australians cut their subscriptions to streaming services and 33% cut their subscriptions to magazines, apps and other goods and products in the March quarter.
This highlights the stable and habitual relationship readers have with news, the importance they place on it and the fact that so many Australians seek it out on a daily basis. It also demonstrates the value that news has for advertisers, providing them with a reliable, regular and highly engaged audience for marketing activities.
The audience of news publishers is wealthier and more willing to buy.
Examination of audience profiles shows how valuable news readership is to advertisers. The data shows that Australians with high net worth (over $1 million in savings and/or investments) are 28% more likely to read news than the average Australian. It also shows that paying news readers are 24% more likely than the general population to be homeowners, more likely to experiment with new products and services, and 25% more likely to be big spenders. This data shows that news readership offers a high ROI.
Fault tolerance
The margin of error to be taken into account in an estimate depends mainly on the number of interviews on which it is based. The margin of error gives an indication of the likely range within which the estimates lie with a 95% probability, expressed as the number of percentage points above or below the actual estimate. Design effects (such as stratification and weighting) should be taken into account accordingly.
| Sample size | Percentage estimate |
| 40% – 60% | 25% or 75% | 10% or 90% | 5% or 95% | |
| 1,000 | ±3.0 | ±2.7 | ±1.9 | ±1.3 |
| 5,000 | ±1.4 | ±1.2 | ±0.8 | ±0.6 |
| 7,500 | ±1.1 | ±1.0 | ±0.7 | ±0.5 |
| 10,000 | ±1.0 | ±0.9 | ±0.6 | ±0.4 |
| 20,000 | ±0.7 | ±0.6 | ±0.4 | ±0.3 |
| 50,000 | ±0.4 | ±0.4 | ±0.3 | ±0.2 |
