Analysis: Rupert Murdoch's Sun on Sunday - Success or Failure?

Britain's Sunday tabloid market has been muted since News of the World's scandal-driven exit from newsagents' shelves in July.

With the loss of the most vocal, most read and, above all, most profitable Sunday newspaper in Britain, a noticeable void was left.

This gap has been slightly filled by News of the World's rivals, with half of the paper's old readership jumping to the Sunday Mirror and Daily Star Sunday.

As for the other half - they appear to have left the Sunday tabloid market altogether.

About 800,000 readers disappeared from market circulation figures immediately after the News of the World closed in July and another 550,000 were temporarily picked up by other papers, before they stopped buying Sunday papers at the end of 2011.

By the time it was closed down in a mire of phone hacking and corruption allegations, the kind of sleaze the 168-year-old tabloid thrived on, it was averaging 2.66 million sales every month.

The question for Rupert Murdoch is can the Sun on Sunday, which will launch on 26 February, claw back the News of the World's old readership and make it enticing enough to bring back those who stopped buying Sunday papers altogether?

"News of the World was a great paper. It was professionally run, it was award-winning, it was very in tune with what British people want to read on a Sunday morning," Patrick Smith, editor and chief analyst of TheMediaBriefing.com, told International Business Times UK.

"There's no reason to think they cannot achieve the same thing."

Smith finds it surprising however that Murdoch has sprung the Sun on Sunday's launch so quickly, without a big advertising campaign - but that will not stop it being an immediate financial success.

"It will make money from day one because there is spare advertising capacity here," he said.