Publishers are losing ground against tech platforms in the UK as Meta and Alphabet increase their dominance of online media, a new Press Gazette ranking of UK online audience for April 2026 reveals.
Our ranking of the biggest website owners in the UK by audience, based on Ipsos iris data, shows Meta and Alphabet significantly growing their already dominant positions.
UK internet users spent 122 billion minutes with Alphabet-owned websites (including Google and Youtube) in April 2026, up 14% year on year. That is more than 80 minutes per day, per person on average. Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp) is the second biggest website owner in the UK with 117 billion online minutes in April (up 10%).
The two US giants are reckoned to reach 99% (Alphabet) and 97% (Meta) of the UK online population.
Tiktok owner Bytedance is the fastest-growing website publisher in the UK with time spent on its platform growing 30% year on year in April to 33 billion minutes.
These three companies are some way ahead of the next biggest UK online publisher in terms of time spent, Microsoft (on 10.4 billion minutes).
The BBC is the only publisher and the only UK entity to feature in the top ten UK website owners ranked by time spent online with 9.4 billion audience minute in April 2026.
Five publishers figure in the top 25 website owners in the UK: the BBC, Sky, Mail Metro Media (DMG Media), The Guardian and News UK.
In terms of monthly reach, Daily Mail publisher Mail Metro Media recorded the biggest year on year decline in April 2026. The publisher’s audience fell 20.1% year on year to 22.7 million monthly users and was down 7.5% month on month.
The drop follows ownber Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) reporting digital advertising revenue down by 15% in its full year results to 30 September 2025 partly due to the impact of Google’s AI Overviews on traffic to its websites.
It also follows the Daily Mail switching from a .co.uk to .com domain, with a spokesperson for DMG Media adding the figures are “in line with our expectations” and “mirror the experience of news brands that have migrated websites”.
They added: “We are focused on deepening our relationship with readers, and with a direct audience of more than 60%, we aim to increase engagement and drive subscription growth.
“While news brands have seen their total monthly minutes fall, ours remain largely unchanged, with readers spending more time with us compared to other commercial titles.”
DMGT also publishes the Mail on Sunday, Metro, The i Paper, the New Scientist and Newzit.
There were six news media organisations in the top 25 online publishers in the UK ranked by overall reach in April, down from seven in May 2025 and eight in October 2024.
The Independent and Evening Standard dropped out of the top 25 ranking this year, despite being listed as 21st overall last year (sixth among seven news media organisations). It fell 20.3% year on year and 2.51% month on month to an audience of 20.1 million in April 2026.
The BBC remained the biggest news organisation in the top 25 ranked by Reach, with an audience of 42.6 million, up 1.9% year on year and down 1.8% month on month.
Reach ranked eighth, following a 4.6% year-on-year and 3.6% month-on-month audience decline to around 34 million.
The BBC and Sky (up 1% year on year to 29.4 million) were the only news organisations to record growth in audience in April.
Music video network Vevo saw the biggest audience increase, up 123.7% to around 21 million.
Last year, Reddit saw the second-biggest increase in audience (up 27.3%) in Press Gazette’s annual ranking as Google updates meant its users’ posts were more likely to show in search results pages after its owner agreed to a $60m annual deal, allowing the tech giant to train its AI models on Reddit content.
Reddit is still seeing growth year on year, though this has slowed – in April, its audience reach increased by 5.5% to 32.6 million, making it the tenth biggest media organisation in the UK.
Last year, X Corp (formerly Twitter) saw the biggest audience drop as users departed the platform when Elon Musk waded into UK politics in the wake of the Southport attack and subsequent riots in 2024 and became involved in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the same year.
While the social media site saw a 2.1% year-on-year decline in audience numbers to 20.2 million in April, users spent more time with the organisation than this time last year (up 18% year on year to 4.7 billion minutes).
More Press Gazette top 25 online publisher rankings:
Top 25 organisations by UK online audience in 2023
Top 25 organisations by UK online audience in 2024
Top 25 organisations by UK online audience in 2025
Apple saw the biggest drop in total minutes, down 12% year on year to six billion (making it with the eighth biggest by that metric).
The BBC, Sky and The Guardian were the only news media organisations to grow their user minutes.
The BBC grew its minutes by 5.3% to 9.4 billion, followed by Sky and The Guardian (up 5.5% to 862 million).
Despite seeing the biggest decline in audience across all media organisations, Mail Metro Media was the second-biggest news media publisher by time spent with a 1.5% fall to 1.4 billion minutes.
Reach saw the biggest drop in time spent, down 6.6% to 597 million minutes.
Looking at total time spent online with sites owned by the top 25 online publishers in the UK: 82% of time was with US-owned sites, 10% China and 5% UK.
Since 2025, the US-owned sites increased time spent by around ten billion minutes, China by six billion and the UK by one billion. Spotify is Swedish-owned, and the only country to feature outside of the US, UK and China.
Several publishers fell just outside the top 25 online organisations list as ranked by monthly UK audience reach:
- Yahoo – 19 million
- ITV – 18.5 million
- Future – 17.6 million
- Telegraph Media Group – 16.1 million
- Immediate media – 15.1 million
- Newsquest – 14.9 million
Ipsos iris uses a mixture of results from a 10,000-strong survey panel and site-based user tracking to provide its estimates for online reach.
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