Profits Surge for Trinity Mirror Following Local World Acquisition

Profits at Trinity Mirror have surged by more than 42 per cent, driven by the acquisition of Local World, with the publisher also reporting a strong growth in digital revenues and audiences.  

In its half-yearly financial report for the 27 weeks ending 3 July, Trinity Mirror reported a year-on-year increase in revenue of 29.9 per cent to £374.7 million with adjusted profit before tax increasing by 42.3 per cent.  

Like for like publishing digital revenue grew by 14.4 per cent to £39.7 million with digital display and transactional revenue growing by 27.8 per cent. Digital audience experienced strong growth with average monthly page views growing by 19 per cent to 770 million on a like for like basis.

Johnston Press has also announced strong growth in digital audiences this week. In its interim results for the 26 weeks ending on 2 July, the publisher’s digital audience grew on the same period last year by 22.4 per cent to an average monthly audience, excluding the inews.co.uk website, of 24.4 million. 

Including inews.co.uk, the publisher’s total audience across print and digital in June was 32.7 million, up eight per cent year-on-year, with i experiencing significant growth in print circulation.

Johnston Press said ABC figures show circulation of 309,990 on 25 June, a growth of 24 per cent versus the corresponding issue last year, whilst the month as whole was up 7.2 per cent year-on-year. 

inews.co.uk launched on 14 April, reached 50,000 unique users on average per day in June and achieved  3.4 million page views over the month. The website continues to see steady growth in audiences, with more than 600,000 unique browsers in its first month, growing to 1.2 million in June and reaching 1.65 million page views in the last week of June.