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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Plunging Google Discover traffic hits Reach revenue | GB News losses £131m since launch
And Daily Mail’s royal editor says stories came from press office in Harry privacy case, while Perplexity claims News Corp tried to ‘entrap’ chatbot to make copyright case
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Tuesday, 3 March.
📉 The latest results from Reach explain why the UK’s biggest consumer news publisher has embraced digital subscriptions so enthusiastically (launching paywalls at five regional titles and the Express in the past three months).
Overall digital revenue fell 0.9% to £128.9m in 2025 and print revenue fell 4.6% to £388m.
However, cost cuts meant profit actually grew 2.4% to £104.7m.
CEO Piers North told investors that plunging referral traffic from volatile aggregation platform Google Discover was partly to blame for a sharp dip in digital revenue at the end of the year.
Google Discover has increasingly prioritised content from X and Youtube over publisher articles in recent months. It has also become a home for clickbait misinformation, put out by fake websites to game its algorithm. Thanks Google.
If Reach is going to be a company with a future it has to find a way for digital revenue growth to start cancelling out print decline. Print still comprises three-quarters of Reach turnover.
Those print revenue figures are propped up by cover prices that have risen fast since 2020. The Mirror and Daily Express now cost £2 per day (up from 80p and 70p respectively in 2020).
As well as online subscriptions, Reach is investing in video, AI (including writing tool Guten) and e-commerce to boost digital revenue.
But I wonder if the short-term demands of the stock market to keep profits up will give it the headroom it needs to invest for long-term sustainability.
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Losses to date for owners Sir Paul Marshall and Legatum Ventures have grown to more than £131m. The channel has, however, again recorded strong revenue growth, and staff cuts helped it to reduce losses.
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An email sent to her from a South Africa-based freelance, which appeared to contain illegally-blagged flight information, was the one awkward detail she faced.
But some of Harry’s other claims were laughable.
He said a story detailing his outrage over a picture published in an Italian magazine of his dying mother show the Daily Mail was “plainly listening in to calls as well as spending large sums on private investigators”.
It was “beyond cruel and an abuse of journalistic privilege”.
English said the story in question was based entirely on a press release sent out by the royal family and a follow-up conversation with a press officer.