Let’s take The Times and Sunday Times as examples, seeing as we have some figures to play with following our post of this morning, and see what sort of answers you might get. The conclusion is that the print plus digital combination is not pointing the way to much growth yet.

1. Monthly circulation figures.

This is the most positive indicator. Start with the print sales in June. So for The Times, they were 503,642 – down by 11,737. The Sunday Times gave up 32,035 at 1.085 million. Average that out and you get a loss of  14,636 across both titles over the seven days.

Now, compare that to the growth in online sales and iPad sales — 27,500 in total. That looks like victory: overall seven day sales (online gains minus print losses) are up by 12,864. But it does take the charitable view that the online numbers follow a one off high profile launch. It’s unlikely that the 27,500 gain will be repeated in future months.

2. Reversing longer term sales decline?

All ‘broadsheet’ newspapers are in sales decline. The Times sold 503,642 in June — compared to 590,900  in the same month a year ago. But last year’s figure included 51,785 giveaways. So, the real decline is 35,473 or 6.6 per cent.

The Sunday Times sold 1,191,726 in June 2009, with bulk giveaways stripped out. That had dropped to 1,085,724 in June of this year — a fall of 106,002 or 8.9 per cent. That means over seven days (counting The Sunday Times as a seventh of the drop off) circulation fell by 45,448 at both newspapers.

Which means that 27,500 new online paying readers replaced just over a half of last year’s circulation losses. That’s probably a fairer comparison than a single month head to head, if only because the launch of a new service is such a one off event. Or to put it another way, online gains don’t even takes the Times titles back to where they were a year ago.

3. Money.

This is the most important one, and it is the toughest comparison because print readers are so much more valuable than digital ones.

Now, because the audited circulation figures are daily averages, we can fairly assume that every reader counted buys the title every day of the week. So each reader counted is worth £6.50 at the tills for The Times and another £2 at The Sunday Times. That’s £8.50 a week.  Strip out the retailer’s take and the distribution fee, and the gross receipt to the publisher would be about £6 – or about £26 in an average month.

Meanwhile, the sensible online reader pays £2 a week (the best deal on offer), or about £8.50 a month. No money is shared with the retailer or distributor, although presumably there are some merchant processing fees, so lets round it down to £8 a month for News Corporation, the publisher. Then factor in that some of the less bargain conscious pay £1 a day several days a month, rather than go for the £2 a week deal, so let’s say the average digital reader is worth  £10 a month.

Handily, The Times iPad app costs about £10 a month, although I have no idea how much money goes to Apple/merchants and all that. So, before anybody helps me, I’ll be kind and say News Corp keeps all that tenner. (++ Update: I’m actually told that Apple keeps about 30 per cent; so the true back to publisher number is £7 — which would make a difference to the calculation below ++)

All of which means that the typical print reader (£26) is worth at least two and a half times (£10) the average online reader. And the figure could be more like three times.

So, for those of you still here and having fun, it means that the 27,500 new digital subscribers are equivalent to 10,576 new print readers. Now compare that to the annual sales decline of 45,778  – or even the one month decline of 14,636.

On that measure, at this moment in time, defeat.

Original article ... http://www.beehivecity.com/newspapers/times-paywall-more-analysis-of-the...