Top local newsbrands in the UK collectively grew their online audiences in 2024, new data from Ipsos iris shows, while the total minutes users spent with them shrank.
Among the group of 87 news titles to appear in Ipsos iris’ list of the top 2,100 online brands in the UK for January 2025, 51 increased the total size of their audience compared with January 2024 while 31 increased the total number of minutes spent on their platforms.
In line with this the average monthly audience at the 87 brands increased by 7.2% from 1.8 million last year to 1.9 million this year, while the average number of minutes spent on them by audiences fell 7.7% from 6.3 million to 5.9 million.
In comparison, the average circulation per issue at daily print regional newspapers audited by ABC dropped 16% between the second halves of 2023 and 2024.
Reach’s Manchester Evening News remains the largest local newsbrand in the Ipsos data with a monthly audience of 12.6 million, an increase of 14.6% year-on-year. It also topped the chart for monthly minutes, which increased 7.2% to 67.4 million.
The Manchester title was followed by The London Standard (previously known as the Evening Standard), which registered a largely flat audience of 10.1 million and an 11.7% decline in the amount of time audiences were spending with it, to 40.4 million minutes.
After the Standard the next 11 brands with the largest audiences were all Reach titles, including Birmingham Live (third place for audience and fourth for minutes), the Daily Record (fourth for audience, third for minutes), Wales Online and the Liverpool Echo.
Birmingham Live was previously second placed on the list, but dropped down following a 26% year-on-year audience decline.
The largest growth among the 87 online local newsbrands was also at a Reach title, Surrey Live, which increased its audience 320% to 4.4 million and time spent on its platforms 202% to 5.6 million minutes. Much of this growth is likely powered by broad-appeal content tailored for Google Discover and search, rather than local audiences, as the population of Surrey is 1.2 million.
Surrey Live appears to have developed particular authority and discoverability on Google when it comes to health and nutrition coverage. It publishes dozens of stories every day on topics like how to avoid Alzheimer's disease, how to lose weight and how to live longer. Other Reach brands have similarly developed non-local-news content niches. For instance Birmingham Live offers deep coverage every day on personal finance matters often based on the latest pronouncements from Martin Lewis and the Department for Work and Pensions.
[Read more: Google Discover has become Reach’s ‘biggest referrer of traffic’]
Overall four of the five fastest growers for audience size, and seven of the top ten, were Reach brands. Other notable risers included Leeds Live (3.9 million audience, up 179%) and Lancs Live (2.2 million, up 155%), while THG-owned City AM (audience 2.2 million) was the third-fastest riser year-on-year, up 155%.
Another 34 titles saw their audience decline year-on-year by at least one percentage point. The largest of these falls was at Newsquest’s Bracknellnews (164,000 in January 2025), which shed three-quarters of its audience from a year earlier, followed by National World’s BristolWorld (174,000, down 61%) and Reach’s Chronicle Live (3.1 million, down 34%).
All three also saw a decline in time spent on their platforms, although the drop was sharpest at BristolWorld (down 49% year-on-year to 312,000) and Chronicle Live’s total minutes fell at a far shallower 3%, to 12.8 million.
The proportionally largest drop in total minutes was at Gloucestershire Live (3.5 million, down 63%), followed by BristolWorld and Reach’s MyLondon (2.8 million, down 42.4%). Declines of 30% or greater were seen at 11 brands.
Surrey Live recorded the greatest increase in monthly minutes, followed by City AM (3.7 million, up 197%) and Newsquest’s Bolton News (2.4 million, up 191%). Seven brands at least doubled the time audiences spent on their platforms year-on-year.
Among the 87 titles in Ipsos iris’ top 2,100, 37 are published by Reach, 22 by Newsquest and 21 by National World.
Across their titles and platforms, all the top three publishers saw increases in the size of their audience year-on-year and total minutes spent, although these figures include Reach’s three national brands, the Daily Mirror, Daily Express and Daily Star as well as magazine brand OK!.
Newsquest both recorded the greatest proportional increase in audience size across its platforms (15.4 million, up 5%) of the three publishers and was the only one to increase total minutes spent on its brands (91.6 million, up 18.3%).
Newsquest Scotland editor-in-chief Callum Baird told Press Gazette this month that staff at the company are currently told: “Don’t worry about page views. We want you to just drive subscriptions. We want people to come back and read your stuff. And we want real quality from you.”
[Read more: ‘Don’t worry about page views’ — Newsquest Scotland tops 40,000 online subscriptions]
Ipsos iris replaced Comscore as the news industry-recognised standard data provider in 2021. Ipsos iris data is partly derived from a panel of 10,000 people aged 15 and over that is designed to be nationally representative. The participants have meters installed across 25,000 personal devices to passively measure website and app usage.
This data is combined with data from participating websites which are tagged so all devices visiting the site can be identified and logged.
As of January 2022, Ipsos increased the sources of embedded browser traffic (web content viewed within a mobile app) counted in its data. Its monthly data now includes webpages consumed within other mobile app embedded browsers such as Linkedin, Twitter, Google News and Instagram, as well as Facebook which has been counted in its data since 2021.
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