Reddit has seen the biggest audience growth in a year among the 25 biggest website publishers in the UK, according to data provider Ipsos iris.
The social media forum’s audience was up by 48.2% in October compared to the same month the previous year, reaching 27.4 million people (internet population aged 15 and over) in the UK.
In the past year Reddit has reportedly been one of the biggest beneficiaries of Google algorithm updates, with its users’ posts receiving much more visibility in search results pages.
In February 2024, Reddit signed a content licensing deal with Google to give the search giant access to its users’ content for AI training data.
Reddit is now the 14th biggest online publisher in the UK, compared to 29th last year.
Meanwhile, there were eight news media organisations in the top 25 online publishers in the UK in October, but only two in the top ten: the BBC (which has a big entertainment audience as well as news) and Reach (publisher of the Mirror, Express and Daily Star and dozens of regional websites).
The BBC was in fifth place behind the big four tech organisations: Google owner Alphabet (audience of 49.6 million, up 0.6% year-on-year), Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp owner Meta (48.5 million, up 1.3%), Amazon (45.6 million, up 1%) and Microsoft (43.6 million, up 1.4%).
The BBC had an audience of 40 million people, up 4.3% compared to the year before. Sky, which also has a large entertainment offering rather than being primarily a news provider in this context, also saw growth of 7.2% (12th place, audience of 28.9 million).
However, every other news publisher in the top 25 online organisations saw a year-on-year decline, the biggest of which was at Mail Metro Media (audience of 26.4 million, down 11.4%) which dropped out of the top ten from ninth place to 16th place compared to October 2023. In September 2023 it had been in eleventh place.
News UK (24.8 million, down 9.1% year-on-year) also saw a big drop in places, from 11th to 17th.
X (previously Twitter) fell from 15th to 20th place in the past year with an audience of 23 million people. Although it saw a relatively small decline of 3.1%, this compared with growth at all the comparable tech and social media platforms.
News providers outside the top 25 but within the top 50 include: ITV (26th place, 19.2 million, up 23.2% year-on-year), Yahoo (29th, 17.9 million, up 10.8%), Immediate Media (30th, 17.8 million, down 10%), Telegraph Media Group (38th, 15.4 million, up 11.2%), Hearst (39th, 15.1 million, down 20.2%), Newsquest (40th, 15 million, up 6.8%), Red Ventures (48th, 14 million, down 9%) and National World (49th, 13.8 million, down 1.8%).
Engagement for UK's biggest website publishers
Top of the table for time spent among the website publishers, Alphabet/Google saw the biggest jump in minutes spent with its sites, up 76.5% to reach 105.6 billion across October and overtake Meta (102.1 billion) which had been top last year.
Alphabet also had the most average minutes per person (2,129) and page views (25.7 billion, despite a drop of 5.9%).
Tiktok owner Bytedance was in 15th place by audience size (27.3 million, up 12.7%) but in third by total minutes spent (23 billion, up 7%) and average minutes per person (843).
Despite its audience growth, Reddit saw the second-biggest drop in page views (down 23.9% to 719.9 million).
Among news organisations, The Independent and Evening Standard saw the biggest growth in minutes (202.6 million, up 8.7%) followed by Sky (1.5 billion, up 3.3%) with the rest seeing declines.
The biggest drop was at The Guardian (805.5 million minutes, down 31.4%), followed by Reach (635.5 million, down 21.9%).
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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