Managers at the newspaper conducted a survey which discovered the paper was losing about 90,000 readers a day to its website, which offers the same content as the paper but for free.

Perhaps alone among the online newspapers in the UK, The Sun is one of the few where online has not had a particularly positive effect on print circulation. Notably the Guardian newspaper, the UK's biggest online at around a 100 million page impressions a month, has been enthusiastic about online publishing. Its web title has helped reinforce the brand's standing amongst readers, attracted an international audience and even made readers more likely to purchase the paper when offline. But that's in the quality market.

It seems that in the pure entertainment field where The Sun largely operates, online content of the nature that appears in the paper - celebrity stories, kiss and tells etc - is too perishable to make people bother to buy the paper as well. Most of the editorial will now vanish, along with the famous Page Three site, which gets phenomenal traffic for too a obvious reason to bother elaborating on here.

Online "popular" tabloids in the UK do not appear to be feeling the pinch across the board however. The Daily Mirror, The Sun's bitter rival, has made no such move so far. But then, its web site is not as comprehensive as the Sun's and it features many more promotional devices not specific to the paper. It is also not as lavishly funded as The Sun online.

In addition, The Mirror has not been stuffy about producing only-online content such as the iBlog section, a slightly painful rip-off of the blogging phenomenon, re-jigged for a non-blogging audience, which looks at technology and gadgets. Fine - it works.

So what hope is there for the online "popular" newspaper?

Perhaps the answer lies in the dim and distant past.

Back in the day (1997), Express Newspapers, owners of the The Daily Star popular tabloid, had a thriving new media department. They developed the concept of Megastar.co.uk, a site which extended the paper's appeal almost into the realms of the sassier monthly Lads Mags like Loaded and FHM.

One of their biggest draws was the Friday afternoon online chat session with a page three model, which attracted normally non-Star readers like titillated businessmen. These FT-reading chaps would never have been caught dead reading The Star, but here they were, happily hitting the site to read the latest throwaway celeb news, catch up on the party antics of their favourite footballers, and, of course, look at the page three models.

The site thus enabled Express Newspapers, a highly conservative organisation then and now, to attract an entirely new audience of young, professional men with cash to spare.

What happened? Porn publisher Richard Desmond bought the Express, closed the department and sold Megastar in early 2001 to the Entertainment and Sports Agency Group, based in Lancashire. Megastar.co.uk continues to this day and now has no relationship with the Daily Star newspaper or Express Newspapers.

My point? Online tabloid papers need to do something different to what they do in print, whether that be a place to buy the products pushed in the paper or for live events where you can "virtually" meet the celebs they write about.

Or instead, just shovel all the content online and pay the price in circulation.

Mike Butcher
Mike@mbites.com