December 5, 2018

Mirror Media, one of Ireland’s biggest news media organisations and part of Reach Plc, announce the publication of the new Readership Survey (Ireland) 2017-18.

The survey is the first piece of audience analysis in the Irish newsbrands market that fuses print readership data with online media consumption via comScore, enabling publishers to provide combined audience reach across their print and digital platforms for the first time.

The publisher of the Irish Daily and Sunday Mirror, Irishmirror.ie and DublinLive.ie welcomes the data release and is one of three publishing groups so far to partner with the initiative. The group will make its figures available to stakeholders in the coming weeks.

Joanne McGreevy, Managing Director of Mirror Media, says: “It is important that media owners, agencies and clients alike have an audience measurement system that captures the way in which people now consume media, which is in both digital and physical formats.

“It’s about acknowledging the complex measurement and commercial issues we as an industry continue to face and to provide a robust multi-platform solution. The media landscape has changed beyond recognition in the past few years and Irish newsbrands need to be at the forefront of that change, helping our partners make sense of it all.

“I am confident the new Irish Readership Survey is a future proof solution that works for everybody and that is why Mirror Media is backing the publication of the new combined reach results.”

According to the new Irish Readership Survey (2017-18), Mirror Media newsbrands – Irish Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Irishmirror.ie and DublinLive.ie – reach 2.04 million readers in Ireland every month across print, desktop, mobile and tablet devices; of which 53% are male and 47% female. That’s equivalent to over half of the population (56%) getting their news via the Irish Mirror platforms and Dublin Live.

Nearly half a million (487,000) of those readers still opt for a newspaper every month, with 1.5 million accessing the Irish Mirror online on the go and 650,000 browsing Dublin Live. As a Dublin centric, digital-only brand for Dublin, the new Readership Survey tells us 1 in 3 Dubs consume content on Dublin Live on the go each month (Population source: dublinchamber.ie).

Every month, more than 1.3 million people aged 35+ choose to read a Mirror Media title – 26% via the printed editions and 88% online; that means over 700,000 of Mirror Media’s total audience are 15-34-year-olds.

Fieldwork was conducted between February 2017 and January 2018 and consisted of 7,000 face-to-face interviews at over 504 sampling points around Ireland, surveying media consumption habits of participants – how they access content and which brands or outlets they read most regularly. RSMB fused the data to incorporate digital audience estimates from comScore, resulting with a de-duplicated data integration providing a fully inclusive measurement of multi-platform audiences across print and digital.