ABC News leads the pack as The Australian jumps 45%

Nathan Jolly

September 22, 2025 10:37

ABC News and news.com.au are moving further ahead of their Australian news rivals, with over 3.5 million readers separating the country’s top two sites from Nine in third place.

ABC News had over 13 million monthly readers in August, according to the Ipsos iris ranking report, which measures the country’s most-read news website, extrapolating the reading habits from 8,000 devices to achieve a national representation. News.com.au had 12.683 million for the month, a 5.4% jump from July.

The next most-read site is nine.com.au, which saw readership fall under the 10 million mark, to 9.106 million for the month. This represented a drop of 10.7%. Seven News and The Guardian are both nipping at Nine’s heels, with 7news.com.au sitting at 8.394 million readers, and The Guardian gaining 8.6% to reach 8.077 million readers.

The Guardian has had a topsy turvy year, numbers-wise. From February to March, Guardian readership leaped by 16%, from 7.5 million to over 8.7 million. In April it lost 413,000 of these new readers, then gained a million in May, before losing more than two million in June. In July, it gained 45,000 readers, to sit at 7.44 million. Now, it has pushed back over the 8-million-mark.

Yahoo News also saw a gain, albeit a modest 2.3% jump, to sit at 5.518 million readers for the month.

The top ten most-read Australian news sites in August, according to Ipsos iris rankings

The Sydney Morning Herald is the country’s most-read paywalled site, with 6.721 million readers, while its Melbourne counterpart, The Age, had 5.217 million readers for the month.

The Daily Mail Aus, which has also recently started paywalling sections of its site, fell by close to 12% during the month to slide just behind the SMH, with 6.508 million monthly readers for August.

The Daily Mail audience has declined consistently from the start of the year: whether the trend is related to its Mail+ partial paywall is an open question.

Interestingly, The Australian — which is completely paywalled, save for its homepage — jumped into the Top 10, with 5.186 million readers – a whopping 45% readership leap.

An increase of 1.6 million readers to a paywalled website means either a) the newspaper has achieved the single largest month-to-month subscriber increase in its six-decade history; or b) an inordinate amount of non-subscribers found their way to paywalled Australian stories or the homepage.

News Corp is certainly claiming the victory, writing in a press release that The Australian was “setting a new benchmark with its biggest audience on record since the launch of Ipsos iris. The result follows the launch of The Australian’s new Wealth vertical and significant business reporting.”

The Wealth vertical is a new section that collates some of The Australian’s financial reporting. Like the rest of the site, it is paywalled.

Mumbrella contracted Ipsos for clarification on the readership spike, and a spokesperson confirmed that it was, in fact, b) an inordinate amount of non-subscribers.

According to Ipsos iris, people were being served up The Australian’s stories through third-party aggregators like Apple News and Google News, before presumably hitting a paywall when they attempted to click through.

“The Australian has seen a general increase in activity from off platform including Apple News in August,” the Ipsos spokesperson said.

Whether this represents ‘readership’ in real terms is open to interpretation.