While I am yet to complete the newsagent sales benchmark study for the April / June quarter, I have completed my magazine analysis. Overall, magazine sales in the sample group of over 100 newsagencies are down, on average, 9%. This is based on a same store year on year basis. What is interesting is that the decline is lower for the weeklies and major monthlies. Weeklies are down 4% and major monthlies are down 5%. This is a change in the trend which I saw in the January / March newsagent sales benchmark study.
There are more newsagencies reporting growth than earlier this year. However, this is balanced by some reporting considerable declines. In most cases, the larger declines appear to be related to economic conditions.
The sales benchmark study involved data from more than one hundred newsagencies covering April through June 2009 and the same period in 2008. I removed newsagencies at extremes from the dataset where the extreme results appeard to be completely due to local factors.