Half of the German population reads a newspaper every day. That is the result of the latest media analysis for the daily newspaper sector, which was published on Wednesday by the media analysis working group.
For this year’s MA 2022 daily newspapers, 136,387 German-speaking people aged 14 and over were surveyed. The reach data is the basis for the advertising industry when creating its media planning strategies and thus ultimately for the distribution of advertising money.
According to these figures, the total reach of all newspapers is 35.4 million people. This corresponds to a readership of 50.1 percent of the German-speaking population. In the previous year, 35.6 million readers were identified, which corresponded to a reach of 50.4 percent.
The media analysis does not go into the reasons for the development, but other surveys show that special developments such as the corona pandemic or the war in Ukraine have a significant impact on the need for information.
The reach of traditional daily newspapers has been declining for years. In 2012, exactly a decade ago, two out of three people over the age of 14 read a daily newspaper in Germany. In 2016, the reach of 59.2 percent was below the 60 percent mark for the first time, in 2018 it was still 55.8 percent. Recently, however, the downward trend has slowed down significantly.
While the downward trend for newspapers for sale continued, subscription newspapers were even able to increase slightly in the past twelve months, bucking the general trend. The number of readers increased by 200,000 to 39.4 million, the reach from 42.8 to 43 percent. Regional subscription newspapers have the greatest reach. They increased their readership by 100,000 to 29.1 million. According to the figures of the MA daily newspapers, the daily mirror has a reach of 400,000 readers. A year earlier it was 380,000. In March 2021, the Tagesspiegel published its own reader analysis.
