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How Reach returned to audience growth | Top newsletter platforms compared
And the latest quarterly radio listener figures show GB News Radio leading the pack in terms of growth
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Reach has managed to slam the brakes on two years of online audience decline and move back into growth.
The growth of referral traffic from Google Discover has been a major factor. Little also delved further into how use of a central team creating content about various hot topics has removed much repetition which was going on across the network of newsbrands.
For Reach there is more to it than Birmingham journalists just focusing on covering the hell out of their patch. The Birmingham Mail reaches a huge national audience for its coverage of personal finance. Surrey Live has become a font of diet and health content.
The economics of this require audience-growth journalists to produce many stories per day.
But all the advertising revenue this brings in keeps Reach journalism free and supports more revelatory public interest stuff which may have less mass appeal.
Today we also have a brilliant guide to newsletter platforms.
I'm a huge fan of Substack because it is easy to use, simple, has a great network of publications and is FREE (unless you are charging readers).
But other platforms are available. Our guide weighs up the pros and cons of the four leading newsletter platforms and finds that Substack gets expensive pretty quickly when you are charging for content.
And finally, we analyse the latest quarterly radio listening figures from Rajar. GB News Radio is the biggest winner, possibly reflecting the rise in popularity of Reform (a party which, it feels fair to say, is in synch with GB News politically).
News UK's Talk, formerly Talk Radio, has meanwhile seen a sharp decline in audience since the closure of its sister TV channel.
On Press Gazette:
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How Reach returned to audience growth after two years of decline
Reach was chasing the same readers with the same content, says audience director Martin Little.
Newsletter platforms for publishers compared: Substack versus the rest
We compare costs and functionality of Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv and Kit.
RAJARs Q1 2025: News UK’s Talk sees weekly reach fall by a third
“The unstoppable growth of GB News Radio is continuing with the people’s channel breaking new records across the board.”
Also in Press Gazette this week:
How business behind German newspaper of record Die Zeit went ‘from misery to paradise’
Immediate reports video revenue up 60% since 2022 strategy change
Google AI Overviews leads to dramatic reduction in clickthroughs for Mail Online
How Google forced publishers to accept AI scraping as price of appearing in search
New York Times editor Joe Kahn defends publishing Trump story every half hour
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