The Sun and the Mail have both made redundancies to their US editorial teams this week.
Over the past year to 18 months many news publishers have been hit by Google algorithm changes and Facebook’s move away from news, with falling advertising revenue often following. The current moment has been dubbed the end of the “traffic era”.
The publisher of The Sun, where the larger redundancies were made, said it needed to “reset the strategy and resize the team to secure the long term, sustainable future for The Sun’s business in the US”.
The Sun launched a dedicated US website at the-sun.com in late 2019, creating new content aimed directly at an American audience as well as building on the brand’s existing entertainment and royal coverage. An accompanying app launch followed in May this year.
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It steadily grew traffic and peaked in April 2023 at 95.4 million monthly visits in the US, according to digital market intelligence company Similarweb.
In August the site was on just over a third of that, with 34.1 million US visits according to Similarweb.
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On Press Gazette's latest round-up of the 50 biggest news websites in the US, The Sun was in 34th place with the biggest year-on-year decline of 46%. In December 2022 it was the 18th biggest site amid a long streak of seeing the biggest growth.
However Will Payne, The Sun’s director of digital who led the site’s launch, once told Press Gazette the US Sun over-indexed on mobile and this is less well-reflected on Similarweb.
In its latest quarterly results, The Sun's owner News Corp said the brand (thesun.co.uk, the-sun.com and other associated websites and mobile apps) reached 112 million monthly unique users in June, down 30% from 159 million in the same month the year before, according to Meta Pixel.
News Corp also cited "lower digital advertising mainly driven by a decline in traffic at some mastheads due to platform-related changes", although this was not referring to The Sun alone. Programmatic advertising has been the primary source of revenue for the US Sun and the site "became profitable much, much quicker than we anticipated", Payne said two years ago.
Earlier in the year News Corp said that in March The Sun reached 126 million global monthly unique users, down 37% year-on-year from 199 million.
According to Similarweb, between March and August 68% of visits to The Sun US came via organic search, with 13% direct, 11% from social and 8% through other referrals.
Staff were told this week of the redundancies. One of the affected journalists, deputy head of SEO Gabriella Iannetta, wrote on Linkedin: "I was part of mass layoffs at the US Sun this week nearly nine months after being laid off last year.
"It’s been a tough 12 months for publishers everywhere and newsrooms are hurting as Google and Meta move to keep users on its own properties and away from news outlets.
"News Corp has been a special place for me. I was one of the first SEO editors at The Sun when it first opened in 2020. It became the fastest growing digital news site of its time. I boomeranged back in 2024 as an associate head to support the editorial team’s SEO and article quality needs."
Other editorial staff to have posted online about being laid off include general news reporters, entertainment reporters and sports reporters.
A spokesperson told Press Gazette: "The US Sun has been an incredibly successful business, driving billions of page views, however the digital landscape has experienced seismic change in the last 12 months and we need to reset the strategy and resize the team to secure the long term, sustainable future for The Sun’s business in the US."
They declined to confirm how many redundancies were made or the new size of the team.
As it began to grow in early 2020 The US Sun had a team of about 20 people based in New York. Press Gazette later reported that it had almost 100 journalists by October 2022. Some of its journalists are based in London to help provide coverage to start the day in the US.
Mail Online job cuts 'difficult but necessary'
Meanwhile layoffs have also been made at Mail Online in the US, affecting up to 10% of the more than 200 staff based there, Press Gazette understands.
Mail Online founded its first US newsroom in Los Angeles in 2010 and opened its American headquarters in New York in 2012.
It is now the ninth biggest news website in the US (and the biggest British news publisher across the Atlantic) according to Press Gazette's latest monthly ranking, with 136.1 million visits in July up 2% year-on-year.
A spokesperson for Mail publisher Associated Newspapers said: "We have made a small number of job cuts in some areas of our US editorial department.
"This was a difficult, but necessary decision, which will enable us to continue to invest in areas where we can grow our audience."
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