What results for the press in 2020?

An atypical year but not catastrophic: sales of newspapers and magazines fell "only" by 1.5% in France in 2020, national dailies even doing their best, driven by digital technology and the need for information and entertainment for readers in the midst of a pandemic.

With 1.9 billion copies (paper and digital) sold in 2020, the mainstream press "is doing much better than the pessimistic scenarios had predicted", underlines the deputy director general of the Alliance for the figures press and media (ACPM), Jean-Paul Dietsch, on the occasion of the publication of the 2020 trends.

Despite an unfavorable context for many industries, the press, whose distribution was also disrupted by the liquidation of Presstalis, suffered less erosion than in 2019, when it had recorded a decline in its circulation of 3.6% by compared to 2018. Note: the ACPM has decided to neutralize in its calculations the months of March to June, marked by the first confinement and "the closure of most businesses", which therefore do not reflect a fundamental trend, Mr. Dietsch explains to AFP.

The Covid-19 pandemic nonetheless "accelerated" according to him the transition from paper to the web, potentially by "two to three years".

The sales of newspapers and magazines in their digital versions (PDF), which represent 356 million copies, thus jumped by 34.3% compared to 2019, while press sites and applications recorded a record number of visits, to more than 26 billion, or 31.9% more than in 2019.

The World

Champion

Champion of the year,

can boast of double-digit growth: + 20.8% for more than 393,000 copies per day on average, including nearly 280,000 digital versions. 

recorded the second largest increase, of 8.1%, for 76,522 copies.

Second national title with 331,927 copies,

also progressed by 1.2%.

The improvement also concerns

(+ 3.6%),

(+ 5.9%), while

is almost stable (-0.6%).

On the other hand, the year proved to be delicate for

(-14.4%) and

(-7.7%), which suffered particularly from the cessation of sports competitions.

For its part, the regional daily press, less "digitized", recorded a decline of 3.1%, to 3.6 million copies per day.

However, it continues to evolve, with a jump of nearly 40% for digital newspapers (353,000 copies).

In detail, the biggest dailies fell more or less slightly:

(-1.2%),

(-3.2%),

(-2.3%) and

(- 1.1%).

Success in children

As for the magazine press, its circulation fell by 1.9% to 761 million copies over the year, including 108 million in digital version (+ 30.4%).

Among the major news weeklies,

progressed (+ 4.6%) unlike

(-13.8%) or Le

(-4.9%).

Note, the good performance of the bimonthly

(+ 55.68% to 76,225 copies), including the two issues devoted to the Dupont de Ligonnès affair were snapped up last summer.

And those of the children's press, acclaimed "for at least three years" by parents anxious to fight against disinformation or the profusion of screens and social networks, according to Mr. Dietsch, but who has surely also benefited from the crisis: + 53% for

, + 45% for

, + 23% for

...