Who said newspaper’s are dead. Look at this data visualisation of the world’s top 100 newspapers which I knocked together and which tells another story. According to this newspapers are cooking like never before – in certain parts of the globe at least.
You can see from this how Asia is the undeniable top of the pops when it comes to newspaper reading populations with Japan, China and India between them selling tens of millions of papers in their top titles every day.
The newspaper industry in the US and Europe is small potatoes by comparison. Few US titiles make it into the top 100 and even fewer from Europe, pretty ironic when you consider that this was where newspapers were born.
Africa is even more dismal. Only one paper from the continent cracks the top 100 and that’s Al-Ahram of Egypt with a 900 000 circulation.
The Japanese papers are simply astounding with their circulation numbers. Yomiuri Shimbun with over 14million circulation simply blows one’s mind! Asahi Shimbun at 12 million is no slouch either.
By comparison, the US “greats” are Mickey Mouse operations. The grand New York Times slips in with a puny 1,2million and US Today, as that market leader, with 2.3million.
India and China you can pretty much understand with their enormous populations, but I find it fascinating that Thailand, Taiwan and South Korea produce a plethora of world-beaters. The consensus that newspapers still have plenty of life left in them in emerging markets seems to hold a lot of credence when you look at this.
Also kind of puts into perspective the Sunday newspaper “wars” that we see in SA. Here, we all seem to be fighting over crumbs. Surely in markets such as South Africa or Nigeria there must be potential for the same sort of performance we see in a place like Thailand. With a population of 66m, we’re not so far behind. Nigeria is a far bigger market. So what’s holding us back? Oh, wait. Literacy. Thailand has 92,6% literacy versus 86.6% in SA (this may be a generous estimate) and Nigeria’s 68%.
Or maybe our newspapers are simply too boring.

Popularity: 3% [?]