The London Evening Standard attracted an average of 1.35 million readers a day between October 2009 and March 2010, beating paid-for titles The Guardian and The Independent, according to new readership figures for national daily newspapers.

The National Readership Survey (NRS) figures differ to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) figures as it canvasses 36,000 people to find out how many readers are estimated to have read a particular newspaper. ABC reports the number of copies of papers sold.

The new data measures the first six-month period of The London Evening Standard as it switched to a free newspaper and ballooned its distribution to 600,000 copies a day.

Between October 2008 and March 2009, the 50p London Evening Standard was pulling in a daily average readership of 586,000. A year on and it has a readership figure of 1.35 million.

The Alexander Lebedev-owned newspaper recorded more than double the estimated readership of The Independent, also owned by Lebedev, which recorded 543,000 readers per day between October 2009 and March 2010, with no year-on-year change.

The Guardian recorded a readership figure of 1.1 million in the period, down 3% year on year.
The Guardian and The Independent, though, had considerably lower circulations than the Evening Standard in the period.

The biggest faller in the London-based daily national titles, according to NRS, was the Daily Express, which recorded 1.4 million readers, down 9% year on year. The setback for owner Richard Desmond was counterbalanced by a 10% rise in the Daily Star's readership to 1.58 million.

The Daily Mirror dropped 6% to 3.22 million readers and The Sun dropped 1% to 7.68 million readers.
But The Sun remains the stand-out performer, ahead of the second-placed Daily Mail with a readership of 4.67 million, down 2%, and the third placed Daily Mirror.

The Daily Telegraph was up 1% to 1.76 million and The Times was down 4% to 1.67 million.