Daily Mail Australia loses 2.5m readers in a year
The Daily Mail globally has been hit hard by AI overviews in search (Mumbrella)
The Daily Mail Australia has shed close to 2.5m readers in a year, with 28.5% of its monthly audience jumping ship since January 2025, according to Ipsos Iris monthly tracking.
Earlier this month, the Daily Mail’s UK parent company blamed a 15% digital revenue drop for the year ended September 30 on “website traffic being adversely affected by the introduction of AI overviews by search engine providers, resulting in fewer users clicking through to news websites.”
The Daily Mail introduced a partial paywall model in Australia in October 2024.
Eight of the top ten websites fell from December, which saw a spike in traffic due to the Bondi shootings. SBS and Yahoo were the only publications to improve on their December traffic.
ABC News has maintained its spot as the country’s most-read news website for January, but has seen traffic drop year-on-year as well as month-on-month.
ABC News drew 12.14m readers during January, down from 12.92m in December and back from the 12.5m it achieved in January 2025.
News.com.au is the second most-read site with 12.05m, a modest 2.2% slip from December, but up from 11.76m in January 2025.
Nine and The Guardian both lost readers year-on-year and month-on-month, while SMH fell 9.8% for the month, but slightly increased its year-on-year audience.
The ranking report from Ipsos iris
Related Content
Interesting read! It’s surprising how much AI-generated summaries are affecting traffic for traditional news sites. Shows how quickly user behavior is changing in the digital news space.