THE Irish News - officially the best-performing daily newspaper in the UK and Ireland this year - will today launch its exclusive new digital content offering called 'Premium'.
The new service at www.irishnews.com follows a massive surge in the paper's digital footprint across numerous channels via our website, social media and newsletters, which has seen digital subscriptions more than double.
And the online initiative follows the exceptional performance of the print edition after the latest independent Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) figures showed that The Irish News outperformed every other title in the first half of this year.
It was one of only two papers across Britain and Northern Ireland to post increases over both the previous six months and the corresponding period in 2016.
In the first half of 2017, The Irish News had an average daily circulation of 36,115 (35,463 print and 652 digital). This represented an increase of 592 (or 1.7 per cent) on the previous six months and 194 (0.54 per cent) on same period last year.
The growth in our online services has seen the launch of a digital replica of the daily newspaper available on our website or downloaded as an app on iTunes or on Android, where we have an audience that spans the globe, including countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia, Peru, South Africa and Japan.
The Irish News website sees more than 100 articles published every day, with users allowed a weekly allowance of articles before being asked to subscribe.
And the next step from today is the launch of 'Premium', where locked content in our newspaper - including opinion and analysis columnists - will only be available on subscription.
Irish News marketing manager John Brolly said: "The growth in our online subscribers highlights the importance of readers paying for our online content, so from today onwards anyone reading our columnists online will be asked to subscribe to one of our subscription packages.
"As subscribers they will then have unlimited access to content on irishnews.com. Our print readers will still be able to read all columnists in the printed edition of the Irish News."
Meanwhile the latest TGI survey shows that six out of 10 adults read newspapers in Northern Ireland, with 150,000 adults reading the print edition of The Irish News in every day.
And our readers are the most loyal, reading 5.1 issues in a week (the Northern Ireland average for all newspapers is 3.5 issues), while they read our paper for five hours a week (versus 3.7 hours average for all others).
Indeed some 122,000 people read The Irish News and no other regional newspaper (News Letter / Belfast Telegraph), while our readers reflect the urban/ rural geographical spread of population across the north, meaning we're read in Belfast and Belcoo, Derry and Drumquin.
