Reach has returned to audience growth after experiencing double-digit declines in 2023 and 2024.
Audience director (digital distribution and marketing) Martin Little described Reach, the UK’s largest commercial publisher, as being “like an oil tanker with the turning circle of a Mini Cooper” because of the speed it had executed a turnaround in its audience decline.
Reach had been sitting on a combined monthly audience of 42 million people, Little told the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Krakow last week, but it then “started to go into reverse” in 2023 amid widespread referral declines from Google and Facebook.
At one point online audience for Reach was falling at a rate of 26% year on year, he said, “and that was a real challenge for us. But we have returned to growth.”
Page view numbers in Reach’s financial reports show a peak decline of 33% year on year in Q1 2024 compared to a year earlier. By Q4 it had got back into growth (up 6% from a 24% drop in Q4 2023) with “increased audience engagement through the use of data”, a trend that continued in Q1 2025 (up 9%).
The turnaround was also reflected in Reach’s social audience numbers: its combined following was sitting on around 80 million “for a long, long time”, Little said, but that number began to accelerate in Q4 2024 and the publisher announced it had crossed the 100 million mark at the end of January.
In addition Reach’s referral traffic from Google is up 43% year on year despite widespread challenges to clickthroughs as AI-generated summaries appear in more searches. The growth largely reflects referral’s from Google’s smartphone-based news aggregation app Discover rather than from search results pages.
Little said: “That at its heart is down to the way we diversified the content we produce to hit more people across more search queries across a greater range of entities on Discover and making sure that no longer were our brands all running the same thing at the same time trying to get to the same people.”
Little told Press Gazette after the presentation: “We’ve made great progress but things are always moving. We will always be following the data and adapting what we are doing to match the needs of our readers.”
Little attributed the turnaround across the business to the use of audience data in helping journalists to decide what they should be focusing on and what they should leave to other Reach newsrooms. His WAN-IFRA presentation was a sponsored session with content intelligence platform Marfeel.
Little said Reach became concerned about the amount of resources being used to create the same story multiple times. “As that story took off, and as that story was being consumed in multiple different places, every one of our newsrooms pounced on that and they all wanted a bit of that pie. And in some ways that makes sense because supply and demand principle, right, there’s demand there so everyone tries to supply that and get what they can out of it. But it led to a sequence of problems for us.
“One was it’s inefficient. Duplication of effort is a real challenge in that regard: imagine what we could do if we weren’t all doing the same thing at the same time. And we had websites fighting for the same readers…”
The other challenge, he added, was a “lack of diversity in content. And what that led to, unsurprisingly, was a lack of diversity in our readership. And at its heart, really, that’s what started to send us backwards.
“So we looked at it and we came up with let’s try something completely different across our entire editorial function of 2,000 journalists.”
Little spoke about the restructuring of teams so there was better central support for Reach’s 120 newsrooms to “allow them to carry on doing what they do best: producing great content around things that we want those brands to be famous for and ultimately make sure those brands cut through what’s a lot of noise in day-to-day publishing”.
The central content hub was created last year, with around 300 journalists tasked with creating stories across areas like screen time, spare time, trending topics, sports, money and lifestyle, which would then be published on the brands where it is deemed they will have the biggest impact through use of audience data. Initiatives aimed at reaching under-35s, like the Curiously social brand, and an overnight desk tasked with helping regional brands cover breaking news, also tie in.
Reach used data to do topic segmentation across its entire portfolio to identify which areas were overlapping between brands. Little said: “That allowed us – and this is a hard conversation with your editors – but it allowed us to go round the whole business and allocate quite granular universal topics to individual parts of the business.”
For example health content has been huge for Surrey Live on Google Discover, helping it become the 46th biggest news website in the UK with 221% year-on-year growth in March, while Birmingham Live leans into personal finance (especially Martin Lewis), weather and news from the Department of Work and Pensions.
Express editor Tom Hunt told Press Gazette last month that becoming “best in class” for core topics like politics, defence and royals would help the brand survive while he also cited gardening and travel as areas that work well across its platforms.
Reach also created an editorial intelligence and digital distribution team led by Little covering SEO, social, secure channels like SMS and newsletters, off-platform syndication, customer marketing, and online safety and community around how people engage with the content.
The team’s job is essentially to make sure that content is seen and engaged with by the maximum number of people each day, Little said, and that working with the content hub “hand in hand has been critical for getting the results we needed”.
Little advised publishers not to underestimate the importance of real-time content monitoring. He said this had helped Reach get a “far better view” on what worked on Google Discover, which has become the publisher’s single biggest referrer.
He said: “Equipping our newsdesks with this has helped them understand the content that’s working for us on Discover in a way that a lot of our other analytics tools couldn’t get to, it’s allowed them to understand what’s working for our competitors and takes fresh content ideas from that that we can actually start to think about ‘how could I get visibility on Discover…?'”
Little admitted that talking about using data to help journalists sounded “a bit mid-2010s” but noted that a lot of newsrooms don’t do it enough.
All 2,000 journalists at Reach now get their own automated personalised audience report every day sharing information about how users have interacted with their work, including how much time they spent on it, what they commented on, what they shared and what they left quickly after reading.
Little gave the example of a Daily Mirror journalist who increased page views generated from his content by 15 times in a two-week window after starting to get his reports last year, and said this has been sustained since.
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