LONDON: The New Day, the print-only newspaper launched nine weeks ago is to close from today, while The Independent, which around the same time announced it would become digital-only, has claimed a "positive customer response" to the shift away from print.

Trinity Mirror had pitched The New Day at 35-55 year olds "who want a more modern approach to news" but it seems that few consumers felt that strongly about it as the reported daily circulation of 40,000 was far below the target of 200,000.

The company put a brave face on the decision, saying the "the launch and subsequent closure have provided new insights into enhancing our newspapers and a number of these opportunities will be considered over time".

Trinity Mirror also released trading figures for the four months to May, which revealed that print advertising revenues across the group had fallen by 19% and circulation revenues by 4.5% while digital grew by 15.7%.

In a statement, it said: "We continue to see strong growth in digital audience with average monthly page views, excluding galleries, across the publishing sites growing by 22% to 755m on a like-for-like basis."

The Independent, meanwhile, reported that its monthly audience had grown 33.3% in the last 12 months to nearly 70m global unique users.

It added that positive consumer response to The Independent's digital-only future was also evident in the uptake of the new subscription app – The Independent Daily Edition – where subscriber numbers already exceeded those of the former print edition by more than 50%.

And it highlighted the popularity of its Indy100 product with Millennials: the list of 100 top news stories is ordered by readers' votes and has gained an audience of seven million global unique users.

Owner ESI Media is backing the brand with further investment in its editorial and commercial operations, the latter including capabilities across programmatic, audience targeting, native content, creative solutions and ad tech relationships.

In addition, The Independent is aiming to be able to trade 100% of its inventory programmatically within a year, whilst at the same time offering custom solutions.

Data sourced from The Independent; additional content by Warc staff