Marcus May
Crikey, the independent news and analysis source, is reporting that the number of people interacting with Sky News is falling rapidly.
Crikey’s media reporter, Daanyal Saeed, writes “Sky News Australia’s online influence is rapidly deteriorating. In March, Sky News Australia dropped out of the top 20 Australian news websites, according to Ipsos rankings, after peaking as high as 11th in May 2023.
Meanwhile, on Facebook, figures from analytics tool CrowdTangle show that while its follower counts continue to rise, weekly interactions sit at around 200,000, a shadow of the brand’s performance in 2020 and less than half of its 2023 peak of around 500,000.
Sky’s interaction rate — its interactions per follower (a key metric for newsrooms as to how much readers are engaging with content — has plummeted. In September 2020, it peaked at just over 0.15%, and sits at around 0.01% now, even dropping from 0.03% in November.”
Looking at those figures graphically, it’s plain what is happening with Sky News in Australia.
And, Saeed adds, it’s happening in the USA as well.
The Atlantic reports that traffic decline on Facebook has been seen across a number of conservative American media outlets. Fox News, Sky’s stateside stablemate, lost 22% of traffic in February compared to the same month in 2020,” according to Comscore data. That works out to being down to the tune of 23 million visitors.
The Atlantic reports there was no similarly impactful drop off for liberal-minded competitors, positing that conservative media might be particularly dependent on social media referrals.
In an increasingly disrupted media landscape, that’s a bit of sunshine, don’t you think? The less disinformation the better.
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