Why are readers fleeing from Australia’s top news sites?
Australia’s ten most-visited news sites lost millions of readers throughout June, with The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, and the ABC suffering the most dramatic audience drops.
With over 12 million readers, ABC News remains the most-read Australian news site, according to the latest Ipsos Iris data. This is despite losing more than 1.9 million readers from May to June.
The Guardian lost more than one-fifth of its audience during June, dropping close to 2.1 million readers, and falling from 9.38 million to 7.395 million. That decline of 21% is the biggest monthly fall of any major news site over at least the past year (see trend graph below).
Sydney Morning Herald shed 16% of readers – falling by over 1.2 million readers, from 7.76 million to 6.53 million, while 7news.com.au, nine.com.au, and Yahoo Australia lost more than half a million readers apiece.
Added together, the top 10 Australian news sites lost over 8 million in audience: although that number is not de-duplicated (it contains the same people counted more than once) it is indicative of a big drop in advertising impressions.
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So, what can this massive audience drop be put down to?
The obvious answer is May’s election coverage. However, May’s audience numbers didn’t see a major leap across the board, with only the ABC, The Guardian and The BBC seeing substantial hikes from April to May.
In turn, May’s numbers were rebounding from a quiet April, that saw eight of the top ten news sites lose audience, with nine.com.au alone dropping over a million.
This isn’t seasonal either — audience numbers didn’t shift substantially between May and June 2024, nor between May and June in 2023.
The Guardian has had a volatile year, making it somewhat of an outlier. In March, it enjoyed a 16% readership spike, picking up 1.2 million readers in a month. In April it shed 413,000 of these new readers, before gaining over a million more in May. Then it dropped double this in June. Despite the rollercoaster, there is a trend downwards. In February, the Guardian’s readership sat at 7.527 million; in June it was 7.395 million.
Another possible cause is the change to Google’s search offering last year, which now uses artificial intelligence to neatly summarise search answers, saving users a click through to the news sites that generated this information, and depriving the publication of a click.
Last month the Wall Street Journal published a damning feature: “News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools”, which used Similarweb data to show the share of New York Times digital traffic from organic search fell to 36.5% in April 2025 from 44% three years earlier. Business Insider’s search traffic dropped by 55% during the same time period, while the Washington Post’s more than halved.
This data, however, covers a three-year span, whereas the local traffic drop is over a thirty-day period.
An Ipsos Iris spokesperson tells Mumbrella “there is always variation month to month for the top news brands as they fight it out for attention,” and notes news category audience is actually up slightly year on year.
“What has changed more is the number of news brands competing for attention amongst Australians online,” the spokesperson explains.
“There are 3% more brands competing for attention in the news category. There are almost 1,000 online news brands being consumed in June 2025 – that is a lot of competition for attention.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Pretty weird that they all dropped down. Could have been post-election effect. Or it could be that lots of people are tired of being bomb-barded by pretty ordinary stuff.
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I’m agreeing with your AI call. People were probably going to the mastheads for some sort of depth and parsing pre-election, but since then have succumbed to the learned helplessness paragraph that now sits atop the goggle search. Would be curious to know if sports metrics align with general news in the above chart.
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In today’s news… a young bubbly presenter speaks enthusiastically about house prices rising to even more unaffordable levels; an investments expert recommends getting into fossil fuels; we explain why the latest police atrocities were actually deserved; a politician lies about something and we just parrot what they say; plus, we’ve a polarising selection of sports.
People might feel they’ve seen it all before, perhaps? Or maybe that there’s nothing relatable or positive about consuming it any more.
Maybe yet another story about how it is about to rain in Sydney didn’t hold people’s attention?
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Average agenda or tabloid schlock reporting, opinion pieces dominating over actual news, relentlessly negative subject matter and all behind a paywall and crammed with pre-roll ads.
Wonder why the numbers are dropping?
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