In the past several years it has been the benchmark for the drop in newspaper circulation with as high as 15% drops year on year.

The result comes in this month’s ABC results, which also shows year-on-year drops for most of the major UK national newspapers.

With 1.1% and 0.31% increases respectively, the Financial Times and the Sun were the only national paid for newspapers to see an improvement from October 2007 to March 2008 compared to the same time last year.

The Metro saw a major increase, of 21% on last year. Distribution was up from 1.1m to 1.3m over the six month period.