The Herald has announced a year-on-year increase of 2.4% in paid-for readership in the year to June 2014.
Bucking the national trend, there has been a net increase in paying readership across The Herald's print and digital platforms, attributed to the success of both 'digital only' and 'combination digital and print' subscription packages.
Online paid subscriptions also passed the 10,000 mark for the first time in June 2014.
Heraldscotland.com saw the number of total unique monthly visitors jump 50% to nearly two million from a year earlier.
The Herald & Times Group was the first regional media company in the UK to introduce digital subscriptions, in December 2011. The trend towards online consumption for The Herald is now growing faster than ever, with more than 125% growth in online subscriptions in the year to June 2014, with the rate of increase growing in the last quarter.
At eveningtimes.co.uk, which does not currently have registration or subscription, visitor numbers jumped by 80% to over 700,000.
Herald & Times Group managing director Tim Blott said: "Our decision to charge for digital content proves that readers are still very much willing to pay for quality journalism and our digital products continue to go from strength to strength in terms of paying readership, audience and advertising revenue growth. These paid-for readership figures speak for themselves and from this we see nothing but opportunity.
"I could never have hoped to sell two million copies of our print versions but digitally, if we continue to deliver quality journalism to a worldwide audience, the potential reach and influence of heraldscotland.com is greater than ever before."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
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