News Corp estimates that The Sun’s global online audience more than halved in a year to the end of 2024.
The latest News Corp results revealed The Sun‘s “digital offering” reached 70 million monthly unique users around the world in December 2024, down from 143 million in December 2023, citing Meta Pixel analytics.
News Corp said there had been a 2% drop in advertising revenues in its news media division between October and December.
It said this was “primarily due to lower print advertising revenues and lower digital advertising revenues at News UK mainly driven by a decline in traffic at some mastheads due to algorithm changes at certain platforms”.
The Sun this week launched a Sun Club website subscription charging for some online content for the first time since a failed attempt that ended ten years ago. Most of The Sun content will remain free but it will put columns and extra content across many of its core areas behind the paywall.
Sun ‘less concerned’ about traffic metrics like global UVs in 2025
A Sun spokesperson told Press Gazette: “After an extended period of significant growth, we have been impacted by the volatility of the referrer platforms like everyone else, especially in the US.
“But as you can see from our exciting new video strategy, our prioritisation of registration and this week’s launch of Sun Club, we are focused on growing deeper engagement with our readers and less concerned about pure reach metrics like global UVs.”
Sun director of digital Will Payne told Press Gazette last month that the brand’s Youtube revenues more than doubled in the second half of 2024 and its main channel hit six million subscribers at the end of 2024. Its Youtube watch time, which Payne described as “the metric we care about more than anything now”, was up 40% in July to December compared to the same period in 2023.
In the past year many free news websites have been particularly hit by Google algorithm changes including its core updates, helpful content update and site reputation abuse (relating to e-commerce and coupons pages) as well as Facebook’s deprioritisation of news link posts.
In the UK alone in December, The Sun had an audience of 19.5 million people making it the fourth-biggest newsbrand in the country according to the industry-recognised Ipsos iris measurement data. This was a year-on-year drop of 21%. Its lowest month for audience last year was a monthly UK reach of 18.3 million in September.
Similarweb data for December put The Sun’s global visits down a third year on year to 60.3 million.
In the US, where The Sun launched a dedicated website and team at the start of 2020, the newsbrand made redundancies in September as a result of a stark drop in traffic since its April 2023.
New York post traffic down 27%
The News Corp results revealed fellow tabloid New York Post also saw a notable dip in traffic in the past year, down 27% from 124 million unique users in December 2023 to 90 million according to Google Analytics.
However digital advertising revenues at the New York Post were nonetheless up 13% last quarter.
SEO expert Barry Adams last year described Google algorithm updates, rather than the launch of AI Overviews snippets in research results, as “the biggest threat to a publishing site’s traffic”. Three-quarters of news leaders in a Reuters Institute survey said they were worried about referral traffic from search engines falling this year.
Times titles report subscriptions boost
News Corp’s quality/broadsheet titles have held up better. The Times and Sunday Times, together with the Times Literary Supplement, grew their digital subscribers by 7% in the year to 616,000 – their largest quarterly net growth in two years.
Meanwhile, digital subscribers at News Corp Australia’s news mastheads (including The Australian and The Daily Telegraph) increased by 4% to 979,000.
At Dow Jones, which is a separate News Corp division to the rest of the news media brands, revenues in the quarter were up 3% to $16m driven by higher circulation, subscription and content licensing revenues, partly offset by lower print advertising.
In an investor call on Wednesday, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson described the company’s “three pillars of growth” as digital real estate, Dow Jones and book publishing.
He added however that the news media division had seen the positive impact of “rigorous cost discipline and digital development” and has benefited in terms of revenues and profitability from a deal signed with OpenAI last year.
In the six months ending 31 December, the news media division saw revenue down 3% to $1.1bn but EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation) up 24% to $92m.
It benefitted from lower costs following the closure of TalkTV as a linear channel, the merger of its printing operations with Mail publisher DMG Media, and “reduced costs” at News Corp Australia.
Dow Jones revenue was up 3% in the half year to $1.2bn with EBITDA up 6% to $305m.
News Corp CEO: ‘Our business is thriving’
Thomson spoke about the important of trusted, accurate news content in generative AI models on the investor call.
He said: “We certainly lead the way in providing priceless content for generative AI and remain vigilant in our pursuit of degenerative AI and abuses of our intellectual property. We are pleased with our partnership with OpenAI and hope that other companies in the segment take a similarly enlightened approach.
“Our legal action against the perplexing Perplexity is underway and we look forward with relish to document discovery. We firmly believe that this discovery process will be an important phase, not just for us but for all who cherish the sanctity of IP.
“The sudden rise of Deepseek is itself a salutary lesson for all AI players. If they are unable to host fresh, trusted news their version of AI will lack immediacy and relevance. Data centres and energy sources and new-fangled chips may well be essential AI infrastructure, but ultimately we believe content will be king in the world of AI.”
Thomson added: “In a world in which so many media companies and mastheads are in terminal decline, our business is thriving…”
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