Spectator front page
The Spectator was the only current affairs magazine audited by ABC to grow both print and digital sales in 2025 – rising to the highest total sale in its 198-year history.
Meanwhile, Private Eye remains the biggest selling UK current affairs title with fortnightly sales of 225,642 (down 3.1% year on year).
The Economist remains a global journalism success story with worldwide sales up 1.2% to 981,746.
Scroll down for full table listing UK current affairs magazine sales in 2026.
Due to changes in ABC regulations, many publications boosted their totals by being allowed to count readers who receive both print and digital editions of publications twice in the overall circulation total.
This was not the case for The Spectator (which de-dupes print and digital readers) or The Economist (its 981,746 digital subscriptions total includes those who also receive the print edition). Private Eye does not have a digital edition.
Circulations have also been boosted for some titles (not The Spectator or The Economist) by readership on “all you can read” Spotify-style services for magazines like Apple+ and Readly.
BBC Science Focus, published by Our Media, leads the pack in terms of all you can read sales with total circulation of 353,644 per edition on these services.
For the purposes of ABC, an all you can read sale of an edition is triggered if one article is read once.
Services like Apple+ have become a useful additional revenue source for publishers but the per edition revenue is tiny compared to subscriptions sold directly to readers.
The Spectator grew digital subscriptions by 4.3% to 47,576 and print sales were up 2.7% to 561,52 giving it a total weekly sale of 103,728 (excluding its Australia edition).
The title was bought by Sir Paul Marshall for £100m in September 2024.
Since then he has appointed Michael Gove as editor and invested in the infrastructure of the title.
It has now migrated subscriptions management to an in-house platform.
CEO Freddie Sayers said in a website article: “From the moment we acquired The Spectator in September 2024, we knew that fixing its subscription platform would be key.
“Like many of the world’s top publications, The Spectator was stuck using old-fashioned and expensive ‘bureaus’ to manage its subscriptions. These companies make life frustrating for readers and result in high churn – people cancelling their subscriptions. It’s no exaggeration to say that solving subscriber churn is a big part of saving the future of quality publications.
“To fix this, we couldn’t find the technology we needed off the shelf, and so we invested in building our own solution from the ground up, with single-click sign up, seamless billing, data collection, dramatically improved retention, marketing and in-house customer service all on a single platform.
“The short story is: it’s working… from the moment our subscriptions platform was launched, the trajectories of all our publications turned around.
“We call it CoEditor, and we are now offering it to other publications and subscription businesses around the world – we already have our first external clients.”
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