Last year, German newspaper publishers turned over more than one billion euros with digital offers for the first time. This was announced by the Federal Association of Digital Publishers and Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) on Monday. A good third of this – 365 million euros – came from the sale of e-paper copies. There were also 657 million euros in other digital sales. This primarily means internet advertising, but also offers for paid content.
More and more subscriptions
The e-paper circulation continues to gain in importance. According to the information, it was 2.21 million copies last year – an increase of ten percent. “It turns out that subscriptions to e-papers are also appreciated: two out of three e-paper copies are subscriptions,” according to the association.
According to the figures, in 2021 the newspapers made up for the corona-related decline in sales from the previous year. With 7.2 billion euros, they achieved a nominal increase of 0.6 percent. “The main reason for this was the advertising revenue, which rose by a good seven percent to 1.95 billion euros after the slump in the previous year. However, it was still a good tenth lower than in the pre-Corona year 2019.” Sales of subscriptions, sales and in-flight copies increased by 1.5 percent to 5.25 billion euros. As the BDZV announced, that was almost six percent more than before Corona. The BDZV does not publish industry-wide profit figures.
“The regional subscription newspapers were able to break the negative trend in total sales in 2021 and, with a nominal value of 5.92 billion euros, again reached the result of 2017,” the analysis continued. In Germany, 14.61 million print copies will be sold every day in 2022. Of these, 11.72 million are daily newspapers, 1.29 million are Sunday newspapers and 1.6 million are weekly newspapers.
(mho)
