Mumbai: Indian Readership Survey (IRS) Data released by Media Research Users Council (MRUC) for Q1 2019 has revealed that the total number of readers increased 4.4% to 42.5 crore in (read in last one month), when compared against 40.7 crore in 2017.
Interestingly, Both urban and rural markets has registered same percentage growth in number of readers with 4.2% hike that amounts to 0.9 Cr absolute readers. The Urban market has registered 20.2 crore readers while the volume of readers in rural markets stood at 22.3 crore in Q1, 2019.
Driven by Urban readers, the English dailies have added 0.3 crore readers in Q1 2019, while Rural population guided largely for the growth of Hindi dailies with the addition of 0.6 crore readers. On the other hand they added 0.4 crore readers from Urban India and managed to garner 1 crore additional readers in this period. Rural population has also majorly contributed for the growth of Regional dailies with the addition of 0.5 crore readers against 0.3 crore readers from Urban, thus driving the total readership of Regional Dailies to 21.1 crore readers.
The Total Readership (TR) across the three categories English Dailies, Hindi Dailies and Regional Dailies has registered marginal increase from 36.8% to 37.3%. The average issue readership (AIR) for all dailies has declined from 16.6% to 16.1%. While the average issue readership has declined for both Hindi and regional dailies the same has remained unchanged for English dailies.
Top 5 English Dailies:
The top five English dailies based on Total Readership (TR) are The Times of India, The Hindu, The Economic Times, Mumbai Mirror and The Indian Express. Whereas, under average issue readership the Telegraph took fifth position while the top four spots remained unchanged.
Top 5 Hindi Dailies:
With data for Hindustan and Hindustan Times pending review, the top 5 publications in terms of TR are DainikJagran, DainikBhaskar, Amar Ujala, Daily Thanthi and Lokmat. Based on the AIR data DainikJagran, DainikBhaskar, Amar Ujala remained on top while MalayalaManorama and Rajasthan Patrika are at the fourth and fifth position respectively.
Top 5 Regional Dailies:
The top five regional dailies as per TR data are Daily Thanthi, Lokmat, MalayalaManorama (Daily), Eenadu and Mathrubhumi. Under the AIR data, the top five regional dailies are MalayalaManorama, Eenadu, Daily Thanthi, Mathrubhumi, and Lokmat.
IRS Q1 2019 report is a moving annual total, combining Q2, Q3 and Q4 data of IRS 2017 and Q1 fieldwork of IRS 2019, which began in December 2018 and was completed in Q1 2019. The reporting sample size is 3.24 lakh households.
