CDs are the new bingo for national newspapers. As editors and managers try to prop up continually declining sales, eight free CDs and one DVD were on offer to newspaper buyers two weekends ago. Promiscuous purchasers could take their pick.

Among the offers were Classic Crooners or Top 80s Disco Hits in Richard Desmond’s Daily Express and Daily Star, Classical Legends in The Mail on Sunday or a Starsky & Hutch DVD in the News of the World, all for less than the price of high street coffee. Astute buyers now visit their newsagent, scan the front page blurbs and use their mobiles to check with their friends which newspaper/CD to buy.

But are CDs now running out of steam as a marketing tactic and what will marketing directors think of next to attract new readers? CDs seem to work better for some newspapers than for others.

For the past two years CDs have driven Saturday sales of the Daily Mail to record levels. But last month when it offered CDs on two weekends, average sales were down by 77,000 month on month and year on year by 58,000. Meanwhile the Daily Express promoted CDs every Saturday. Sales rose by 5,000 a day over January and were up year on year by 14,300.

The same puzzling result occurred in the Sunday red-top market where both the Sunday Mirror and The People did two CD offers, but recorded declining sales. Yet the market leader, the News of the World, recorded a February sale of 3.9 million, up year on year by 20,400, after offering a CD that boosted sales by 425,000 and a regional DVD that put on 240,000.

Wherever newspaper people meet they are puzzled by how to arrest the trend of declining sales and how to attract the young to start buying newspapers. Year-on-year sales of tabloids were down by 349,000.

Is one reason for the downturn that newspapers are an “adult” habit which doesn’t kick in until men and women marry, get mortgages and start having children? Are compacts an answer? What is the significance of Metro, the free paper now circulated in several major cities and on its way to a daily distribution of a million?

Several responses follow. This week, for instance, both The Times and The Daily Telegraph announced new initiatives. The compact edition of The Times will be sold in 311 Starbucks coffee shops and the Telegraph will publish a weekly eight-page version of The New York Times as an insert on Thursdays.

The Daily Mail also drew attention this week to another successful new marketing tactic when it announced that it was adding 12 more titles to its Children’s Golden Library. Last autumn both the Mail and Daily Express offered readers the opportunity to build libraries — of children’s classics in the Mail and 50 Great Reads in the Express.

Both launched their projects with free books. Then week by week, readers could buy a book at the bargain price of £2.50 or £2.60. Mail readers could collect a children’s library on Mondays and Tuesdays made up of such books as Robinson Crusoe, The Jungle Book, Swallows and Amazons or Ballet Shoes. On Saturdays Express readers could collect Dickens, the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, Agatha Christie, Frederick Forsyth and the like.

Both projects have been a remarkable success and attracted buyers who have returned week after week, unlike the promiscuous buyers of CDs. The Mail admits to selling about 100,000 books a week, though my sources suggest the true figure is nearer 150,000. The Express is selling up to 70,000. Few bookselling chains could match that.

But the most cheering news for the future of newspapers seems to be appreciated only by aficionados. Online newspapers are not only flourishing, but online recruitment advertising is growing too — it was up by 48 per cent last year.

As The Guardian celebrated the fifth anniversary of its online newspaper, Guardian Unlimited, last night, it revealed that across the world the website now has 7.5 million unique users, compared with 1.1 million readers of the newsprint edition. Newsprint newspapers may be in decline, but the use of online newspapers is growing rapidly. Sales figures will be transformed when the Audit Bureau of Circulations starts adding unique online users to the number of daily buyers of newsprint newspapers in its monthly reports.

A table published by The Guardian showed that in Britain The Sun has 861,000 unique users, The Times 748,000 and The Daily Telegraph 574,000. The Guardian, the first newspaper to go online, has two million.

Assuming that what is true for The Guardian must be true of other online British newspapers, what is most remarkable is their global reach. Using global statistics, 39 per cent of the unique users of Guardian Unlimited are in the US.

That means that three million Americans are reading The Guardian online. The figures suggest that there are 225,000 unique users in Germany, 150,000 in Australia and 75,000 in France and Italy.

None of us knows how “newspapers” will develop over the next ten, 20 or 30 years, but when the history books are written, the development of online newspapers will be a significant chapter.

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