Top news sites collectively received 7.5% fewer visits on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the 2024 US election than they did on those days in 2020, data from Similarweb shows.

The Associated Press, Substack and Axios were among the sites with the most growth between the two elections, while Politico, Fox News, The Guardian and The New York Times all lost substantial proportions of their traffic – according to Similarweb.

After aggregator Yahoo.com (130.6 million visits on Tuesday 5 and Wednesday 6 November) CNN was the most-visited news site in the US, drawing 109.1 million clicks. That figure is down 19.4% on the same days in the 2020 election.

The New York Times (62.4 million) was the second most-visited publisher, but its traffic too dropped 36.3%. Fox News, the third most popular publisher on the list, saw traffic drop 46.8% when compared with the 2020 election, the fifth-largest fall among the top 50 most-visited sites.

Among the ten most-visited news sites over election night, Fox was the biggest faller, followed by The New York Times and CNN. The AP (47.6 million visits, up 247.1%) was the biggest gainer, followed by NBC News (44.3 million, up 120.2%) and USA Today (27.7 million, up 70.1%). The rest of the top ten saw single-digit percentage point changes.

The significant declines at the most-visited sites may reflect broader news avoidance trends or the relative speed with which the result of the 2024 election became clear. The 2020 election, in comparison, took days to be called.

Among the broader top 50 election night news sites the fastest grower was Axios, which saw visits grow 291.7% from 1.8 million in 2020 to 7.2 million last week.

Faster growing still was publishing platform Substack (5.1 million, up 423.1%), which hosts publications by numerous journalists and was less than three years old at the time of the last election.

Web culture site The Daily Dot (2.2m, up 287.5%), Al Jazeera (3.3 million, up 204.2%) and People magazine (11.5 million, up 115.5%) also substantially outperformed their 2020 traffic totals.

The biggest fall, on the other hand, was at Politico (8.8 million visits in 2024, down 63.7% from its 2020 total of 24.3 million), followed by Yahoo News (5.4 million, down 54.8%) and Business Insider (4.2 million, down 48.8%). The Guardian (10.6 million, down 45.2%) Google News (11.3 million, down 40.2%) and Breitbart (3.9 million, down 48.5%) were all also significantly hit.

NBC News, Associated Press and climate site The Cooldown saw largest election week traffic surges

Similarweb data also shows that, among the 100 top news sites in the US, NBC News saw the largest week-on-week increase in its web traffic over the week of the election, with visits nearly tripling compared with the week before.

Climate website The Cooldown saw a comparable increase of 209.4% and the AP received 207% more traffic than the previous week.

A handful of sites saw fewer visits the week of the election than the week before, among them Cosmopolitan (down 15.1%), Variety (down 13.2%) and Vogue (down 8%).

The post Top publishers saw less traffic on day of 2024 US election versus 2020 appeared first on Press Gazette.

Most news publishers who expressed a preference endorsed Kamala Harris as US president, yet Donald Trump has been returned to office.

The margin of victory for Trump, winning both the electoral college and the popular vote, also surprised many in the media and appeared to be fuelled by a campaign which focused more on courting popular podcasters than it did legacy media.

We asked senior leaders at major US news publishers what the lessons are from the presidential election on connecting with audiences.

The Guardian’s US editor Betsy Reed suggested “so-called outrage cycles” may not deserve as much coverage in future as they did not prove to be deal breakers to voters, but she believes the media did do a “pretty good job” conveying the stakes of the election.

Francesca Barber, executive director of global newsroom strategy at Politico, said trust is gained by “listening, not just opining”.

Geordie Greig, editor of The Independent which has been quickly expanding in the US, said the election should remind the media of the importance of short-form video.

Katie Davies, editor of Dailymail.com, said the election only underscored that Americans are “consuming their news in more ways than ever before”.

BBC News director of digital Naja Nielsen said the election showed it is easy to become over-reliant on polls and “nothing beats boots on the ground”.

And The Hill’s director of audience and social media Sarakshi Rai said “being fair and nonpartisan” will help build trust with audiences and show there is not “some kind of underlying agenda”.

Read on to see each of their answers in full.

‘We need to reconsider reporting of outrage cycles’

Betsy Reed, US editor – The Guardian

“Overall, I actually think the media did a pretty good job reporting on the stakes of this election. But we did make a few mistaken assumptions this time around: that people would turn away from Trump because of his dangerous rhetoric and outrageous statements; and that the enthusiasm we observed at Kamala’s rallies would be sufficient to draw voters out, outweighing very real, well-documented concerns voters had about the economy, inflation, and the party in power.

“To be fair, The Guardian and the media did extensively cover voter dissatisfaction with the economy – in particular in our “Confidence Question” series – but we need to seriously consider how much reporting resources we devote to so-called outrage cycles moving forward, when it’s clear those things aren’t ultimately decisive to undecided voters.”

Trust ‘means listening, not just opining’

Francesca Barber, executive director of global newsroom strategy at Politico

“The way people are consuming media and information is changing rapidly – this election cycle saw the power of podcasts and loyalty with relatable, trusted voices amongst specific audiences. Think Call Her Daddy and Joe Rogan as major interview moments for both Trump and Harris.

“Trust is important here: it means listening, not just opining. It means having a direct relationship to audiences in the formats they are consuming (e.g. video, audio, shareable direct messages). And it means being clear who your audience is and building expectations and habit throughout the year, so that during an election cycle, they come to you.

“At Politico, our audience relies on our voice and authority to inform their daily professional lives. They rely on our geographic breadth to contextualize major global moments and our depth of reporting in each local market, to highlight the shifting policy and power dynamics beyond the horse race of an election.

“Now, we must continue to be thoughtful and creative with how and when we’re reaching our readers as we continue to keep up with the changing consumption and technological habits of our readers.”

‘Short-form video is key’

Geordie Greig, editor of The Independent

“The US election showed that, despite Trump’s attacks against many media companies, serious, independent journalism cuts through and still connects, as demonstrated by our record month in the US in September, in which we became the number one British brand in America.

“While we often think of America as being polarised, the exit polling also demonstrated just how many voters see themselves as independent. So there’s clearly a significant appetite for unbiased, authoritative news, and an opportunity for trusted brands to deliver this.

“Readers across the political spectrum seem increasingly to distrust what candidates are saying, but they still want to feel that they know the facts about the issues.

“More broadly, this election showed news brands what we already know. Audiences don’t consume news in the same way they did even ten years ago. Short-form video is key, and you need to meet audiences where they are. That’s why we stepped Independent TV into a higher gear and renewed our focus on platforms like TikTok.

“It remains to be seen whether the industry will experience a second ‘Trump bump,’ but all we can do is continue reporting, and finding our audience wherever they consume news. What we do is on the tin: we will stay independent.”

Audience wants ‘hard facts and unbiased news coverage’

Sarakshi Rai, director of audience and social media – The Hill

“The Hill paid close attention to what our audience wanted from political media outlets this election cycle – hard facts and unbiased news coverage along with data and in-depth analysis. The media needs to embrace being fair and nonpartisan in order to build trust with readers of all political stripes and convince them that there’s not some kind of underlying agenda to their coverage.

“There’s no denying that trust in media outlets has been low this election cycle and at The Hill we followed an editorial policy of not telling our readers what to think but allowing them to understand the facts and make up their own minds. It’s essential that news organisations reach audiences where they are at, not force them to meet them where they want them to be with their coverage that might skew one way or another.

“At The Hill we met our audience exactly where they were, whether it was with our video coverage, data analysis or editorial coverage. It’s not a one size fits all approach, and we made sure we had elements that people wanted from media outlets. Our partnership with Decision Desk also drove audience interest with a data and facts-first approach with polling aggregate numbers throughout the election cycle as well as a forecasting model and live election results.

“And as we looked deeper at the numbers, the results speak for themselves between Election Day and the day after – we not only gave our audiences what they wanted but grew it. TheHill.com saw 9.44 million unique visitors, over 18.34 million page views and 3.43 million video starts on the site.”

‘Americans are consuming their news in more ways than ever before’

Katie Davies, editor-in-chief – Dailymail.com

Dailymail.com saw record levels of traffic on election day, one of its highest-performing days in the US to date, and direct homepage traffic was the highest it had been for two years.

Press Gazette understands Daily Mail Tiktok videos were viewed a record 6.5 billion times in October and 5.3 billion times in September, and its election coverage on the platform received 427 million video views and led to almost 400,000 new followers.

The brand worked with polling firm JL Partners which projected a 287-251 win for Trump, which turned out to be closer to his actual 312 – 226 win than many other pollsters.

Katie Davies said: “This election cycle underscores the fact that Americans, now more than ever, are consuming their news in more ways than ever before. The Daily Mail US broke dozens of exclusives, sat down with insiders and people in power, and published some of the most accurate polling out there and we saw record-breaking amounts of traffic to our website leading up to and throughout the election, particularly on our mobile homepage. But we’ve also seen a tremendous appetite from our users to consume their news in new ways, be that TikTok, our social channels, video and podcasts and more.

“Under the Trump administration we’re going to continue doing what the Daily Mail does best – focus on the engaging stories our readers want to talk about in their daily lives – at the office, the bar, the school run etc. Our election numbers are a clear vote from readers that they love what we are doing and we will continue to hold those in power to account while maintaining our fun, audacious and distinctive Daily Mail voice.”

‘It’s easy to get over-reliant on polls’

Naja Nielsen, director of digital, channel and weather – BBC News

“I oversaw the BBC’s coverage from our Washington Bureau and, I have to say, I think BBC News overall covered it well.

“What in my opinion made BBC News stand out from especially a lot of the US media, was our impartiality and our focus on the voters.

“We also reported and analysed various polls, but it’s easy to get over-reliant on polls and as we have seen, once again, when it comes to gauging the mood among the voters nothing beats boots on the ground and our correspondents and reporters talking to the voters everywhere.

“On top of that first-hand reporting, our Voter Voices initiative proved very valuable. It’s a panel of voters with all types of views and backgrounds that feed into our reporting and help us present a range of views. There are many nuances in the viewpoints of Republicans as well as Democrats and all those who support neither and we wanted to capture that breadth.

“We are also lucky to have a team of expert Washington bureaux who know the country and its politics inside out and we were able to give audiences the benefit of a team at the top of their game – explaining the nuances of the US system and culture to a global audience.

“Our commitment to impartial and transparency also makes us uniquely placed in the US, as well as in the UK. Our investment in BBC Verify US made it possible for us to counter misinformation, and our curious and critical approach to all opinions is something a lot of people are looking for in these often very divisive times.

“This saw us reach huge numbers of people who were coming to us for a source of news they could trust – to cut through the noise and get a clear view. We never take sides, and I genuinely see all of our journalists reporting with open, curious and critical minds. I was following a lot of UK and US coverage and when it became clear, Trump would win, you could hear the tone change across most of US Election shows in one way or another, whereas our team kept being on the ball, reporting the story with no agenda.

“On Tuesday and Wednesday alone our digital journalism attracted around 61 million users – showing what an appetite there is, not only for news on the US election, but for the clarity and impartial view that only the BBC can give.”

The post Polls, trust and video shorts: Lessons for news publishers from US election appeared first on Press Gazette.

Senior executives at Politico, Racing Post and the Financial Times have explained why they charge a high price for quality journalism and resist the temptation to offer heavy discounts.

Politico does not publish prices for its B2B “Pro” subscriptions (but they cost tens of thousands of pounds per year), the FT charges £59 per month for a digital subscription and the Racing Post charges £50 for monthly online access.

Speaking at the recent Press Gazette Future of Media Technology Conference, Politico Europe deputy editor-in-chief Kate Day (who runs the UK team) said: “We are unashamedly expensive. We charge a lot for our subscriptions, tens of thousands of pounds, and people pay it because it’s useful in their job.”

She said subscriptions now account for 60% of Politico’s revenue. Data on which content drives subscriptions and retention gives the editorial team focus, she said: “The biggest value from our journalism is the scoops… that is a very clarifying focusing goal.”

She added: “Where is the value for our readers? In our case it’s because it helps them do their jobs better. We have to keep the newsroom focused all the time on what is the journalism that is going to make a difference, or can they get the same information somewhere else?

“We talk a lot about who our readers are and what they need. The clarity when you know your audience very well is amazing for the newsroom. You need to build that into every part of how your newsroom talks about commissioning, editing and success.”

Day said subscription revenue funds Politico’s teams of specialist journalists who are “the cornerstone of our competitive advantage”.

FT: ‘Deep discounting is very tempting but not the right thing’

FT managing director for consumer revenue Fiona Spooner said the title tries to resist the temptation to offer deep discounts (although in the UK it is currently offering 50% off a digital subscription for the first year).

She said: “We have found that deep discounting is not the right thing for sustainable long term growth. It’s very tempting because you see the results straight away.

“The latest offer for the Washington Post is $29 a year and we are $50-$60 per month, so our pricing is quite significantly higher. We are in a market which is used to discounting. The internal pressure is why don’t we just drop the price?

“When we did that going back to Brexit we had a huge spike in subscriptions…but one year and two years later we saw a big spike in cancellations.”

She said that the FT prefers to offer different packages at lower prices: such as subscriptions to individual newsletters (eg. Inside Politics), or FT Edit (an app which offers access to a selection of FT journalism).

The FT also offers readers who want to read just one article the ability to pay £1 for a four-week trial.

Racing Post: ‘We are unashamedly premium’

Racing Post editor Tom Kerr told the conference: “We are an unashamedly premium product. It’s £5 for the newspaper, £50 a month for a top tier [digital] subscription.

“We realised a long time ago that with the changing economics of the industry, either we could charge people what we thought was a fair price for the quality of content and data we were providing or we would have to cut corners.

“We went down the route of quite aggressive price rises and have been on that path for some time now. If you are offering the quality of content, if it is distinct, if it is unique and if it demonstrably provides value to a discerning audience, people are willing to pay that.”

Guardian: Focus on lifetime value of subscribers

The Guardian currently offers access to the title’s digital edition for £149 per year (up from £99 a year ago). It also offers ad-free reading and unlimited access to The Guardian app for £12 per month.

Guardian chief supporter officer Liz Wynn said the language around reader revenue (which includes a large volume of donations) is different at The Guardian.

“It’s a contribution towards supporting the ongoing work of The Guardian.”

On the subject of retaining reader revenue, she said: “The best way to optimise your churn rate is to run no ads. Driving profitable growth while having the right level of retention is the art…

“For some or our readers they are really engaged and want to buy into premium products and subscriptions and that’s incredibly valuable for us.”

She said a good way to avoid a high churn rate is by focusing on the lifetime value to a business of subscribers (rather than acquisition numbers).

She said: “I am a big fan of running your acquisitions team with a three-year revenue target.”

She added: “If you have an immediate trading problem today, if you want to make a short-term difference, look at winning back lapsed customers.”

Krish Subramanian, CEO and co-founder of Chargebee, told the conference that publishers are increasingly using data science to head off cancellations much earlier.

He said: “It’s not about saving at the point of cancellation, it’s about understanding why they are coming to the point of cancellation. Which cohort of customers are likely to cancel in the next 30 days?

“We see more companies investing in data science to know who is likely to leave and we can pre-empt the motions that are needed to start saving them.

“At the point of acquisition, some companies are establishing transparency about how you can leave, not because a regulator says so but because this is the right way to treat a customer. Those are the businesses that are able to build that level of trust and think about it as a recurring relationship and not as a subscription.”

The post Because we’re worth it: Why FT, Politico and Racing Post charge big for online news appeared first on Press Gazette.

Press Gazette has ranked the biggest UK and US news publishers on Instagram with four achieving follower-counts above ten million.

We looked at the news publishers from our top 50 UK and US website rankings to compile our new research.

Two publishers – BBC News (27.8 million) and CNN (20 million) – are above the 20 million mark. When Press Gazette last ranked publisher Instagram accounts (in June 2023) BBC News had 7.4m followers on the platform and CNN 4.2m.

The top two on Instagram are followed by the New York Times (18.2 million) and People (13.6 million).

In comparison, only one news publisher (Daily Mail) from the two top 50 lists has topped ten million on Tiktok, the newer platform.

Ladbible does not feature in the latest ranking because it has it has fallen out of the list of the top 50 news websites in the UK. It currently has 14.1 million followers to its biggest Instagram account. Cosmopolitan, The Daily Wire, The Verge, NME, Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit similarly have fallen out of our top 50s so do not eapp

Excluding the impact of Ladbible’s removal, the top seven remain the same – but The Guardian (5.8 million followers) in eighth place has overtaken Buzzfeed and Unilad (both 5.7 million).

The fastest-growing Instagram account over a two-year period was the New York Post, increasing by 74.7% since 2022 to 1.2 million.

It was followed by Healthline Media (up 60% since 2022 to 1.3 million) and UK tabloid the Mirror (up 57% to 441,000).

Four news publishers on our list saw their Instagram followings decline since June 2023: Buzzfeed (down 7%), sister publication Huffpost (3% to 3.2 million), Unilad (down 2%) and The Daily Beast (down 2% to 452,000).

Since June 2023 only, the Mirror was the fastest-growing (up 45%) followed by ITV News (up 34% to 512,000) and the New York Post (up 32%).

But the follower count for BBC News increased the most in absolute terms (2.1 million) since last year - almost double the next largest growth seen by Fox News (up 1.2 million to 9.4 million).

Four added at least one million followers to their counts - also including the New York Times and People.

The percentage of people saying they use Instagram for news has risen from 2% in 2014 to 15% this year in 12 key markets surveyed by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (UK, US, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Ireland.

It remains behind Facebook, Youtube and Whatsapp in importance but has overtaken Twitter/X and is still ahead of Tiktok and Snapchat.

The post Two news publishers have 20m+ Instagram followers: Leading UK and US titles ranked appeared first on Press Gazette.

Top political podcasts saw downloads rise 50% or more during the 2024 UK general election, according to their publishers, leading one to dub it “the first podcast election”.

Press Gazette has heard from podcast company Acast, hosting platform Spotify and publishers including the BBC, Telegraph, Politico and Sky, who all report significant listenership growth over the election.

Although podcast publishers are secretive about numbers Press Gazette estimates market leader The Rest Is Politics is likely to have achieved more than ten million downloads in June. No-one from publisher Goalhanger responded to requests for comment.

Update: On 6 August Goalhanger put out a press release stating The Rest is Politics and sister interview podcast Leading together saw combined total downloads and full episode Youtube views of more than 21.6 million in the election campaign period between 22 May and 5 July. This meant they were getting more than 700,000 audio downloads an episode.

Co-host Alastair Campbell said: “It fills me with hope that so many people tuned into our show across the general election. Rory [Stewart] and I aim to fly the flag for balanced debate and real clarity amidst the constant noise of 24-hour rolling news, and we’re delighted to see our audience respond in such positive ways.”

‘Truly the first podcast election’

Podcast production and hosting company Acast told Press Gazette that, “from the announcement through the week of the election, our political podcasts saw an average growth of 53%”.

Sam Shetabi, Acast’s UK content director, added that “podcasting in general has a bit of a summer lull between June and August… whereas all of our news podcasts have completely bucked that trend”.

He said that Political Currency, the Persephonica and Acast podcast featuring former politicians George Osborne and Ed Balls, had been “a superstar” within the group, seeing episode downloads rise 81% between the week the election was called and the week it ended.

Besides Political Currency, he said, the FT’s Political Fix grew by 39%, The Guardian’s Today in Focus grew 47% and The Times’ How To Win An Election grew 43%.

He added the growth had been “greater than that of a lot of our football shows”, despite the surge in listening for those podcasts amid the Euros.

A spokesperson for Spotify, one of the biggest podcast hosting platforms, painted a similar picture, telling Press Gazette: “Total hours played of news and politics podcasts in the UK have increased by 49% over the last 12 months.

“Listeners in the UK to news and politics podcasts have increased 6% over the last 12 months, so there’s been a slight increase in the number of people listening, but a big increase in how long they’re listening for.

“The Rest is Politics is the top political podcast in June 2024, and in 2024 overall [the BBC’s] Newscast has seen the most growth over the last year, increasing its listenership by 64%.”

The BBC, which has increasingly been trying to direct its podcast audiences toward its own platform BBC Sounds, said Sounds saw a record number of listeners on the morning following the election.

A spokesperson said: “Eight out of ten UK adults came to the BBC across all platforms as audiences tuned in to BBC election coverage in their millions.

“The week of the general election was the biggest week for BBC News on BBC Sounds in at least the last 18 months, with results day (5 July) the second biggest day on BBC Sounds overall. We also saw significant audience interest in our election podcasts.”

Other publishers also furnished Press Gazette directly with figures about their increases.

Global said that The News Agents, hosted by former BBC presenters Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall, is nearing 100 million all-time downloads and that “listens are up 45% since the general election was called”. The podcast hit 10 million downloads in December 2022, three months after launch.

The Telegraph’s The Daily T, which launched only shortly before the election was called and hosted the first election trail interview with Rishi Sunak, told Press Gazette its election night and results day episodes “performed on average 45% above a typical episode’s performance”.

“The Rishi Sunak interview was listened to 84% more times than the average episode,” a spokesperson for the publisher added, and “podcast listens the week of the election were 2.7 times higher than the week prior to the election announcement.”

[Read more: Why Telegraph’s Tominey and Ahmed think there is room for another daily podcast]

Politics at Jack and Sam’s, a co-production between Politico and Sky News presented by the former’s UK editor Jack Blanchard and the latter’s deputy political editor Sam Coates, has hit two million downloads since it launched in October.

It had its most successful week following the election, “with more than double the listeners on Monday 8 July than the week before”.

Another Sky podcast, Electoral Dysfunction — fronted by political editor Beth Rigby and politicians Ruth Davidson and Jess Phillips — has also hit two million downloads, having launched in March.

Sky said Electoral Dysfunction was “growing week on week and achieving above our targets” and that its election debrief episode the day after the vote “was the most successful episode to date, with a 40% increase in audience”.

Both the podcasts saw record downloads in June, the publishers said — in part because they increased their frequency, with Electoral Dysfunction going up to twice a week and Politics at Jack and Sam’s going out every weekday.

Dave Terris, the head of audio at Sky News, said it had been “truly the first podcast election”.

“During an average day on the campaign trail, our political editor Beth Rigby and deputy political editor Sam Coates would write an analysis for online, do a TV package for the News at Ten and then discuss the big political news of the moment on Electoral Dysfunction, Politics at Jack and Sam’s and the Sky News Daily…

“Both Electoral Dysfunction and Politics at Jack and Sam’s have reached two million downloads. Considering that nine months ago neither of these propositions existed, we’re extremely pleased to see how they’ve been received.”

Will the influx of new listeners stick around now the election is over?

That listeners would take an interest in politics during an election does not necessarily mean that they will stick around once it’s over. But Acast’s Shetabi said: “We would expect there to be a nice long tail that you retain…

“They will favour one of those shows that they particularly enjoyed listening to over this election period, and I expect there to be growth in all of those shows that continues for the rest of the year.”

Asked how advertisers had taken to the growth of political podcasting given the well-publicised reticence of brands to advertise against some hard news, Shetabi said: “I think there was some nervousness around the election period itself… lots of brands chose to try to [advertise against] other content, and also because we had the Euros there were lots of other opportunities for lots of other ears to reach.”

But he added: “What we have seen with advertisers is if they’ve changed their plans, they’ve moved campaigns to later in the summer, rather than cancel them.

“There’s not really a sensitivity around news and politics per se. It’s more around the current context [of an election].”

Meanwhile, Politico’s executive director of advertising and partnerships for Europe, Rolant Glyn, told Press Gazette: “We’ve had sustained interest from new advertisers to engage with our podcasting output and, in particular, Politics at Jack and Sam’s since its launch.

“The increased number of listeners and subscribers shows an appetite to hear from Jack and Sam’s unique perspective on British politics which we’re expecting to contribute to revenue growth in the second half of the year.”

Podcasters are secretive about exact listener numbers

Unlike radio, television or (to a decreasing extent) print circulations, there is no auditor for podcast audience sizes.

Although multiple publishers were generous enough to provide Press Gazette with data on how their listenership had increased over the election, none were willing to hand over average episode download or monthly listener numbers.

However, Press Gazette did gain access to a copy of the media kit for Goalhanger, the Gary Lineker-founded publisher of the most popular politics podcast, The Rest is Politics.

The media kit appears to date from before the launch of the also highly popular The Rest is Politics USA (which debuted this year) and The Rest is Entertainment (which debuted in November 2023). It claims The Rest is Politics receives eight million downloads monthly, making it the second most popular podcast in Goalhanger’s stable after The Rest is History, which receives ten million downloads monthly.

The Rest is Football, Goalhanger’s third most popular podcast, was on three million downloads a month at the time the kit was issued and The Rest is Money, hosted by Robert Peston and Steph McGovern, was on 500,000.

The publisher said listeners average 40 minutes per episode, that two-thirds of its audience are aged 28 to 59 and 70% of its audience is male.

Which UK political podcasts were popular on Youtube during the UK general election

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do display in-app leaderboards showing which podcasts are most popular, both overall and by topic. Press Gazette has captured the top ten from both leaderboards on Wednesday 17 July below.

Although neither Apple nor Spotify display audience numbers, one other popular podcast medium, Youtube, does.

BBC research, previously reported by Press Gazette, has suggested that approximately one-third of podcast consumers prefer to watch their podcasts than listen to them — something reflected in the popularity of so-called “vodcasts” like The Joe Rogan Experience.

The profile and tastes of these video podcast listeners likely differ in some regards from audio-only podcast consumers, and not all podcasts are published to Youtube. However, because the data is public, it is possible to see how those podcasts that do publish to the video platform fare in relation to one another.

If you have any other podcast listener data to share, let us know at bron.maher@pressgazette.co.uk.

The data shows that on Youtube, too, The Rest is Politics was the most popular UK politics podcast of the election, garnering more than 4.2 million views on podcasts uploaded between the date the election was called and Wednesday 17 June. (Press Gazette has refreshed the above chart twice after publishers requested inclusion. First, the day after publication, to add four additional podcasts: Channel 4's Political Fourcast, Joe Media Group's Politics Joe, Crooked Media's Pod Save the UK and IFS Zooms in from the Institute for Fiscal Studies; second, on 22 July, to add TLDR News' podcast and Novara Media's Novara Live.)

Illustrating the extent to which vodcast and podcast audiences can differ, the second most popular political podcast was that of The New Statesman, which received 3.2 million views. On Spotify and Apple Podcasts The New Statesman Podcast ranks 34th and 32nd respectively at time of writing. (Similarly Politics Joe, which is 71st on Apple, and 29th on Spotify, is fourth on Youtube, and Channel 4's Fourcast, which is second place on Youtube, comes in at 159th on Apple and does not rank at all on Spotify's 50-strong leaderboard.)

The New Statesman (a sister title of Press Gazette) told us after the publication of this story that across all its Youtube content, regardless of publication date, it received 5,212,722 views between 23 May and 18 July. Although we excluded shortform Youtube Shorts from this analysis, the NS channel's Shorts published since 23 May have received 1,484,157 views.

The News Agents was third-ranked among the Youtube podcasts, nearing two million views.

It is also possible to plot how podcast releases performed.

Most podcast publishers on Youtube use the medium to host both their audio products and their general video content. But for the handful of publishers on the above list that mainly use their Youtube channels to host their podcast, it is possible to see use the platform's publicly-available channel subscriber figures to see how subscriptions to certain podcasts on Youtube grew over the election.

Acast's Shetabi told Press Gazette the growth across podcasts during the election showed the market still has plenty of space for new entrants

“The audience size is only growing," he said.

"The election period proved that — all of these shows grew to some extent because people were discovering new shows and new perspective, new angles... You're not going to say that two of these shows in the top 20 news and politics podcasts are the same."

Additional reporting by Amy Seal and Juliana Pamiloza.

The post ‘The first podcast election’: Political podcasts explode in run-up to polling day appeared first on Press Gazette.

Press Gazette’s editorial team report back from two of the hottest election night parties in town.

Politico’s party was billed as an all-nighter and Bron Maher set out with plans to see it through to the bitter end:

5:30pm: Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford divvies up the haul of politically-themed booze he has been sent by Sky News (along with a pair of Adidas Sambas). UK editor Charlotte Tobitt drinks a Beth Rigbeer, Dom has a DaiqRishi and I have a MargKeirita, which, in a positive omen for the presumptive next regime, is surprisingly strong. I convince myself that this is not, in fact, a very stupid way to start a 12-hour night.

7:20pm: The Politico bash is being hosted in the offices of PR firm Brunswick. Unlike some of the other publisher-sponsored events going on, this one promises that it will run all night: bacon sandwiches and barista-made coffee are billed for the morning. Arriving guests are handed an election night bingo game and a card on which they are invited to guess the exit poll seat predictions to win prizes. While typing this passage up I direct a lost Lionel Barber toward the bathroom.

7:30pm: The party is taking place in a wide lounge bounded by a low stage on the far end and a bar along another. TVs beam Sky and GB News to the broader partygoing group, but the press room gets BBC News. The organisers expect tonight’s party to be largely populated by journalists, comms folk and the people that make up the glue of Westminster politics: fewer MPs, more aides and lobbyists.

8:30pm: There’s limitless booze on hand. There is also a lot of chatter about what might be going on at the other parties tonight. We speculate as to whether any of their attendees will come here once their taps are turned off at midnight.

9:30pm: The room is packed. The few present members of the outgoing regime leave to spend the moment of judgement with their chosen family at Tory HQ. At this point Politico’s journalists are still merrily hanging about socialising, but for most of them this is very much the start of a long work night: be it the flagship Playbook email or the various industry-focused newsletters, Politico’s readers are expecting to wake up in the morning with something in their inbox that can explain the new world. Stepping into the quiet of the bathroom, I find my ears are ringing.

9:50pm: People huddle toward the front of the room like they’re waiting for a new year’s countdown. The hosts bring out espresso martinis to help carry everyone through the immense span of time remaining: the first result won’t be for another hour, and it will be five before we learn the fates of numerous Conservative ministers.

9:59pm: The crowd is giddy. The screen switches from Sky to BBC News: turns out free Sambas cannot, in fact, overcome tradition. The TV is also late — a BBC push notification declaring the exit poll arrives a full 30 seconds before the screen gets there, but anyone who notices gamely stays schtum.

10:00pm: A solitary shocked giggle precedes a swell of amazement and whoops — and then the din immediately drops back as people chew the exit poll over. It’s a big majority, no doubt, but it’s not as big as some of the MRPs were projecting. Audio of the moment below:

10:10pm: People are reading Twitter. A snap discussion of the results by Politico staff on stage is kept admirably concise.

10:30pm: Three enormous crates of pizza appear, provided by Brunswick clients Domino’s.

11:00pm: Away from the buzz, it’s all heads-down in the press room. The next morning’s edition of Playbook will be more than 6,000 words long.

11:05pm: Word arrives that, over at the New Statesman party at the National Liberal Club, they are already on their second play-through of D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better.

11:20pm: The incredible amounts of pizza have disappeared, and with them two-thirds of the crowd. Those who remain are enthusiastic, but I begin to grow concerned that this party may not sustain itself through the wee hours of the night, depriving me of precious colour. I just had a coffee, though, so I’m evidently not going anywhere.

11:30pm: At some point the television showing GB News has been turned off.

12:00am: The photographer heads home. It’s still hours yet before the results really pick up. A few clusters of people are still hanging around, but there’s no sign we’re about to see an influx of partygoers seeking safe port after being kicked out elsewhere. As much as I had planned on milking this night for all the copy it was worth, I am starting to feel as though I am intruding on someone else’s work space.

12:30am: I’ve seen enough: it turns out not even a historic election result and limitless alcohol can overcome Londoners’ impulses to go home at midnight. Hours before Rishi Sunak would do the same, I concede defeat.

Things really did get better at the New Statesman election bash

The New Statesman election night party at the National Liberal Club had a strong 1997 vibe and, yes, D-Ream was on the playlist – writes Dominic Ponsford.

Big names spotted at the bar included columnists Janice Turner and Suzanne Moore, Sunday Times executive editor Ben Preston, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, former Observer editor Roger Alton, novelist Howard Jacobson and many more political and media luminaries. The club’s cavernous function room was packed and there was a sense that, like The Sun, folk were flocking to the winning team.

Editor Jason Cowley introduced “a promising young journalist” called Andrew Marr to kick off proceedings with his take on the campaign so far. Freed from the shackles of BBC impartiality Marr can tell us what he really thinks nowadays and he said, far from the campaign being boring, he had watched the implosion of the Conservative Party with unrestrained glee.

Marr drew big laughs when he read out the start of Allister Heath’s election day comment piece in The Telegraph which was headlined: “The UK is about to enter a nightmare much darker than anyone yet realises.” Marr juxtaposed it with a Telegraph business article which said: “Traders are being urged to buy British stocks and bonds amid predictions of a crushing Labour election victory.”

Guest speaker David Lamm said when (not if) he starts work at the Foreign Office he will be much nicer to the Europeans. He also noted that in the whole 20th century, Labour were in power for just 23 years, so this was a moment to enjoy and savour.

We watched the release of the exit poll on big screens (all tuned to the BBC) and it was greeted with rapture from the largely left-leaning crowd ahead of the first Things Can Only Get Better dance- and sing-along.

There were no cocktails on offer, just wine and bottled lager, but hard liquor was not needed last night – most were high instead on the sweet smell of success.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan arrived at 10.45pm to give what felt more like an American political rally speech with pauses for cheering. It was short but sweet, setting the mood for the rest of the night as people began to flock towards the photobooth clutching cardboard cutouts of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Ed Miliband.

The post How Politico and New Statesman election parties toasted Labour’s landslide appeared first on Press Gazette.

More than four in ten of the top 100 news websites in the English language allow all AI web crawlers to scrape their content, Press Gazette analysis has found.

Among the 106 websites listed in Press Gazette’s top 50 rankings for the UK, US and world in December, more than half have OpenAI’s bot for ChatGPT blocked.

Read on for the full list of which news publishers block which AI bots.

[Read more: Major news publishers block the bots as ChatGPT starts taking live news]

What is a web crawler, and why do some news sites block them?

Web crawlers, also known as spiders or bots, are programs which travel across the internet with the goal of saving or indexing it one page at a time. Search engines use web crawlers to identify the websites that make up the internet, and artificial intelligence companies use them to fetch information which they then feed into the large language models that underpin their chatbots.

Most news websites block or permit web crawlers by editing a page on their URL named robots.txt, for example pressgazette.co.uk/robots.txt. A recent article on The Verge delved into the history of this page and its significance to the internet. Robots.txt pages are in effect only advisory: a bot’s creator can, if they choose, instruct it to ignore the robots.txt page.

Web crawlers began receiving extra attention from the news industry last year after publishers realised their content had been used to help train large language models without their consent. Whereas some publishers like The New York Times and the BBC have responded by blocking AI web crawlers, others have left their websites open to the bots or brokered content licensing deals with AI companies.

[Read more: News publishers divided over whether to block ChatGPT]

Which news publishers have blocked which AI bots?

Robots.txt pages are publicly viewable, so Press Gazette was able to manually visit each of the 106 websites appearing on our three top 50 rankings and assess which AI company web crawlers, if any, those sites had blocked. A total of nine web crawlers associated with seven AI businesses were named in the sites’ robots.txt files, which are listed below:

• GPTBot: the web crawler which feeds into ChatGPT, the OpenAI chatbot which kicked off the generative AI craze
• Google-Extended: the crawler which feeds into Google’s AI chatbot Gemini (formerly named Bard)
• Claude-Web, Claudebot and anthropic-ai: three crawlers which feed into Claude, the chatbot built by OpenAI rival Anthropic
• Cohere-ai: the crawler for Cohere, an AI company which targets its chatbot at the business community
• Perplexity-ai: the crawler for Perplexity, another ChatGPT competitor
• Seekr: the crawler for Seekr, a company which builds large language models for a variety of purposes
• Meltwater: the crawler for Meltwater, a media monitoring company incorporating some AI tools.

Of the 106 sites, 45 (42.5%) have no AI company bots blocked at all, versus 61 with at least one bot barred. There were 32 sites with two or more blocked, 16 with three or more, 11 at four or more and five with five crawlers blocked.

The only site on Press Gazette’s list with a blanket ban on almost all web crawlers regardless of their origin or purpose was news.google.com, the website of aggregator Google News. The only crawler allowed to scan the site is Googlebot, which indexes pages for Google search.

The site with the most named web crawlers blocked was another aggregator, MSN, which had six bots barred. The UK and US editions of the BBC website both had five crawlers blocked, and as did News UK-owned the-sun.com, thesun.co.uk and thetimes.co.uk. Two more News Corp titles, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, were not far behind with four crawlers blocked apiece.

ChatGPT’s GPTBot was by far the most commonly blocked web crawler, being disallowed by 60 websites (56.6% of the total). That finding coheres with recent research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which found that at the end of 2023 48% of the most widely used news sites in ten countries were blocking the crawler.

The only website Press Gazette found that blocked some web crawlers but not GPTBot was Reuters, which blocked only the Google and Anthropic bots.

Approximately a quarter of the websites had Google-Extended blocked. Including Google News, only 17 websites (16%) had an AI crawler besides GPTBot or Google-Extended blocked.

Claudebot was blocked only by The New York Times and Seekr only by The Guardian. The next most niche exclusions were Perplexitybot, which is blocked by msn.com, CNBC and The Hill, and Meltwater, which is blocked by The Times and the UK and US editions of The Sun.

And which publishers aren’t blocking the bots at all?

While a modest majority of publishers have blocked some AI web crawlers from their sites, there are numerous major publishers who have not prohibited them.

Mirror, Express and Manchester Evening News publisher Reach for example allows all of its websites that Press Gazette checked to be crawled. The same is true of youth-focused websites Ladbible and Unilad and the Lebedev-owned Independent and Evening Standard.

Politico also does not block the bots, its parent company Axel Springer having struck a deal with OpenAI to feed its publications’ content into ChatGPT. Although that deal does not extend to the other AI companies, Politico’s SVP of product and design told Press Gazette last month that a new website redesign hopes to make politico.eu, its European edition, as readable to web crawlers as possible. (Curiously, fellow Axel Springer title Business Insider blocks both GPTBot and Google-Extended.)

A more surprising appearance on this list of titles which don't block any AI bots is the IAC-owned Daily Beast. IAC’s chairman, Barry Diller, has repeatedly publicly called for AI companies to compensate publishers for their content. Three other IAC properties - People, Entertainment Weekly and Investopedia - block GPTBot but no other AI web crawlers.

Several websites on the political right decline to block AI web crawlers, among them GB News, Newsmax, Zero Hedge, Breitbart and, despite other Murdoch-owned titles all blocking the bots, Fox News. The Drudge Report also effectively allows its site to be crawled because it does not appear to have a robots.txt page at all.

[Read more: Politico embraces generative AI web crawlers with website redesigns]

The post Revealed: Which of the top 100 UK and US news websites are blocking AI crawlers appeared first on Press Gazette.

Politico has reshuffled the six-strong team writing its London Playbook daily email newsletters as it prepares for the general election expected in the UK later this year.

It follows a strong 2023 for the Axel Springer-owned brand, which has grown revenue and headcount as numerous other news outlets have made deep cuts.

Rosa Prince, who has edited Playbook since February 2023, has been promoted to be Politico’s deputy UK editor and will no longer write the agenda-setting morning newsletter, and Playbook reporter Noah Keate has moved to Politico’s live news team.

Who’s writing London Playbook?

Dan Bloom, who was already on the newsletter team, has been promoted to senior Playbook author, and will write alongside new author additions Sam Blewett and Stefan Boscia.

Boscia joins from the Politico Trade team and Blewett from PA Media, where he has been deputy political editor since 2021. Reporter Andrew McDonald will write the Friday edition of the Playbook PM afternoon newsletter, which launched in late 2022.

Also joining the line-up of Playbook contribitors is reporter Bethany Dawson, who takes on the newly-created role of Playbook Diary reporter to keep readers across “conversations that matter, who’s spotted where [and] the chatter in the tearoom”.

Kate Day, deputy editor-in-chief for Politico in Europe, told Press Gazette Dawson had “shown herself to be particularly great at the kind of stories that get Westminster talking, and we really want to have a bit more of that in Playbook into the election”.

As well as the upcoming vote, Day said the changes were in part driven by a simple need to boost editing capacity. “We’ve added a lot of reporters in the last year,” she said.

In December 2022 Politico had 18 journalists in London, a figure that shot up to more than 30 within the following two months. A year on, the publisher’s Westminster office now employs approximately 40 people in editorial roles and a further 20 in commercial ones.

Day said Politico sees the next general election, which is widely expected before the end of the year, as “an opportunity to continue our growth” by growing its audience.

“We still think there are more people out there who could love Politico and should read Politico. So we want to reach them, and an election is a great moment to do that.”

[From last year: Politico ‘nearly doubles’ size of London bureau in a month with plans to triple it]

How Politico grew in a tough year for news businesses

Politico is one of few publishers to see growth, rather than decline, in 2023. Even its sister Axel Springer title Business Insider announced plans to lay off some 8% of staff last month.

Day said she thought Politico’s resilience was down to its focus on “a very well-defined audience”, which she described as “people with an interest in politics, often with a professional stake in politics in some capacity…

“That has kept us very focused on a somewhat narrow audience that we engage with deeply.”

Politico UK brings in roughly as much revenue from its subscription product, Politico Pro, as it does from advertising. “I think that has proved itself to be incredibly valuable in the current climate,” Day said.

“We’re not reliant just on advertising, which for everybody is a somewhat volatile market. We also have deep relationships with subscribers and a subscriber base, and so having the two halves of our business has stood us in good stead through pretty tricky times.”

Even without the diversification, Day said Politico UK had grown its advertising income year-on-year.

Politico Pro, too, has grown. Pro is not a single consumer-focused subscription product but rather a range of sector-specific policy information services, including Playbook-style daily newsletters, access to which is sold directly to relevant businesses.

The first of those newsletters in the UK, Politico Pro Trade UK, launched in 2020 as UK trade policy diverged from that of the European Union for the first time in decades. In 2023 the business added technology and energy verticals, and a financial services vertical will be launching on 20 February.

Politico expands podcast slate

Politico’s newsletters and B2B products are increasingly being joined by an audio slate. Its longer-form Westminster Insider podcast began its 13th season on Friday, and in the past year the brand added weekly podcasts Politics at Jack and Sam’s and Power Play.

“It feels like everybody’s launching a podcast,” Day said, “but we feel – and we’re seeing in the audience numbers – we seem to be offering something a little bit different, that’s quite complementary and still feels very Politico.

“We made our name in newsletters and we’ve translated that into audio in a way that I think is very exciting. And that will be a big part of our election push, for sure.”

For now, the podcasts certainly seem to be paying for themselves.

“We’re selling out of seasons of podcasts,” Day said. “The demand from my business colleagues has been: ‘Give me more!’

“The challenge is actually, usually, to come up with ideas that we think are really distinctive and that can add an audience and still feel like they’re convincingly Politico.”

[Earlier this month: Politico embraces generative AI web crawlers with website redesigns]

The post Politico reshuffles London team after year of headcount and revenue growth appeared first on Press Gazette.

Politico has given its Europe, German and French websites a redesign which improves readability for the web crawlers that feed into generative AI large language models (LLMs).

The relaunched Politico.eu sites, which went live last week, have simpler homepages, with fewer stories, more white space and the French and German-language editions hosting less English-language content.

Max Leroy, Politico’s vice president for product and design, told Press Gazette that although third-party cookies are not something the publisher relies on, their forthcoming deprecation is an “accelerator” for the outlet’s first-party data strategy.

How Politico.eu’s redesign hopes to bring in more first-party data

Readers do not have to log in to read Politico articles (except for those that are part of the B2B subscription product, Politico Pro), which means besides its newsletters it has few ways to gather first-party data on readers.

“We’re trying to change that and to offer features that will be of interest to people that aren’t logged in,” Leroy said. “It has the dual benefit of being great for readers and also for us to collect first-party data and not rely on third-party cookies.”

This does not mean Politico is implementing a registration wall, however. Instead, the publication hopes to give readers more reason to hand over their data through features like a personalised website experience and one-click newsletter sign-ups.

“We have people who come to our site like 15 times a day, and then we have people who have never heard about Politico,” Leroy said. “At the moment, they have exactly the same experience, because we have a single homepage that has, like any [news] website, just a focus on top news.”

Although the new homepage keeps that focus, a “latest news” tab has been added in the revamp.

“If you come every few hours, you will know exactly what’s new, and if you’re logged in it will even tell you what’s new since your last visit,” Leroy said, adding that such features “will set the foundation for us if we decide to have a registration wall, but that will be a larger conversation with all of Politico”.

The redesign is visual as well as technical, but even the sleeker new appearance is aimed at keeping audiences on Politico’s own platforms.

“Another trend we’re playing against is that a lot of browsers are offering a reader experience taking out everything,” Leroy said. “People might have ad blockers. There’s just a lot of things that people do to basically read the content elsewhere to have a nice experience.

“And I think they’re less likely to do this, and more likely to stay on our website, if we have an experience that is closer to this.”

He said Politico had done “a lot of work on cleaning the article page, taking out some of those distractions, putting some related articles as blocks within the content of the article – rather than separated blocks – and those blocks will be controlled by the newsroom so that they can make more relevant recommendations…

“A block of like: ‘here are five more articles that you could read’ – I don’t think they work for any publisher. In my experience they never did.”

From SEO to AIO?

Leroy said Politico was thinking about how, besides traditional search engines and social media, people will find its journalism in future.

Although some of that will be decided “at the Axel Springer level, like the deal with OpenAI”, for Leroy’s team he said planning for the future was a matter of how content will be organised on Politico’s website.

“Perfect mapping of sections, subsections, constant breadcrumbs everywhere so that it’s very clear for a future AI crawler or new Google crawlers that our content is organised this way”.

He hoped these signposts will mean “we start showing up not just in regular search result pages, but in those generated answers in AI-style, conversation-style answers”.

Anyone who’s had to optimise an article for Google will be familiar with the process of tweaking topic pages, keywords and headings to make a story appear higher in search. But how will generative AI optimisation, as it were, differ from search engine optimisation (SEO)?

“I don’t think it differs, I think it’s accelerated,” Leroy said. “With traditional SEO, what every SEO expert will tell you is you have to make sure that your content was almost for the actual bot itself.

“Like: is it in the sitemap? Do you have the author? Do you have the right category and section attached to it?

“But most of the content in the article could somewhat stay relatively neutral – there was less SEO optimisation to be done within the article.

“Whereas if you look at most AI models and the way they’re going to process pieces of an article, they’re really going to anchor on H2s, H3s [i.e. subheadings] – are they able to understand that ‘this is a developing paragraph of this main concept’?”

By actively trying to get scooped up into the LLMs that power generative AIs, Politico is going against the trend for news publishers, many of whom have outright blocked the web crawlers deployed by Google and OpenAI.

[Read more: Major news publishers block the bots as ChatGPT starts taking live news]

Leroy said that with the deployment of new Google answer formats like Search Generative Experience, “when they’re citing different sources – we want to be in those”.

Recent coverage of SEO has been distinctly critical, with The Verge for example describing its practitioners as “the people who ruined the internet” for allegedly reducing the variety and usefulness of Google search query results.

Asked whether he thought optimisation for AI would make news sites more or less user-friendly, Leroy said he thought it would be a mix.

“Some of it will be worse… I know people in other publications [who have been] telling me we have seen these articles [which are] almost lookalikes of our articles, just a few words different, and it’s basically most likely a prompt asking the AI to, instead of copy and paste, make it just different enough so that it doesn’t rank as an exact copy.”

But he said the shift would also be “a wake-up call for some of the more traditional formats. Like, 1,000 word [articles with] no H2, no intermediary step to help you understand where you’re at in the article…

“I talked about how bots can scan the article – but if you read like me, you have less time than stories that you can read per day. And so most of the time I scan by H2.

“And the truth is, people reading A to Z perfectly, no matter how long [the text] – I think that’s rare, and I think we have to think about our audience as not that much different from bots. There is a bit of scanning, their interest is piqued by something, and then they will dive deeper and then they might read what was actually before and after.

“I think the reading experience in the way we have set it, or some publishers have it, is going to evolve for the best.”

Lighter, single-language pages to drive better Google traffic at Politico.eu editions

Leroy said the previous set up for Politico’s French and German editions had punished the site’s performance on Google.

“For example if you go on a French page, it ha[d] content in French and English. This is the worst signal we can send to Google. Because we’re telling Google: we don’t really know who that page is for – or it’s for bilinguals living in either the UK or France.

“In terms of traffic, we see that it’s doing well. But I know by experience that we have no idea of the ceiling here – it could have so much more potential.”

He pointed to the Spanish web edition of The New York Times, which he said has a “lighter template” than the English-language homepage, showing fewer stories.

“We want to have the same approach. The Germany and France homepage will be lighter, but because they will be lighter in a single language, they will actually drive more traffic, because they will be registered in France and in Germany.”

Another way Politico has addressed Google performance is with an edition-specific “hot topics” tab, surfacing only trending stories relevant to, for example, Politico Germany or France.

Politico relaunched its (single-language) UK site last year and Leroy said that brand was “already seeing a lot more traffic than the French page”.

The general, multi-language Europe edition will continue to exist, Leroy said, “and this one will keep ranking extremely well for big moments that we have across Europe”.

But the current set-up, he said, had been “basically trying to do two jobs at once” and ending up “not being ranked by Google for any of those two jobs”.

The post Politico embraces generative AI web crawlers with website redesigns appeared first on Press Gazette.

Politico says it has “nearly doubled” the size of its London bureau to more than 30 journalists over the past month and aims to have reached above 50 within a year and a half.

The bullish growth plans stand in contrast to widespread cuts hitting news publishers in both the UK and US.

Politico Europe deputy editor-in-chief Kate Day, who heads the news organisation in Westminster, told an audience in London’s County Hall: “Back in December we had 18 journalists in London. We’re now at 32, I think — I lose track a little bit. We badly need new offices.”

Politico UK has launched a bevy of new products in recent weeks, including a redesigned website, a Pro subscription product covering UK tech policy and an afternoon edition of the widely-read London Playbook morning briefing. The company has also expanded the size of its live news team, a focus reflected in the design of the new website.

Politico Europe’s editor-in-chief Jamil Anderlini told the event (held in London on Tuesday): “We’ve nearly doubled within the last month or so and we’re probably on track to triple our bureau in Westminster in the next 18 months, so it’s a very exciting time.”

The pair were appearing at a live event described in Playbook PM as “a knees-up to celebrate our expansion” that featured interviews with US ambassador Jane Hartley and Conservative Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch.

Hartley told Anderlini that reading Playbook was “the first thing I do every morning… even before the FT,” possibly unaware former editor Lionel Barber was in the audience.

Following a drinks reception, the 150-odd guests were invited to take home a branded Politico umbrella or tote bag. The latter contained a branded Politico workout shirt, a branded metal straw, a QR code to sign up to Playbook and Politico Pro, and a branded binder clip.

Why Politico is expanding in London while other newsrooms are shrinking

Day told Press Gazette the following afternoon that Politico’s London expansion plans had been in the pipeline for approximately a year. After the company was acquired by Axel Springer in August 2021, Day said, the company decided on a growth strategy wherein “the two priorities for Politico globally are California and the UK”.

Day said Playbook is “read by everybody who matters in Westminster. And we felt there was space to do more, building on the success of Playbook, to engage readers through the day with our free products”.

As well as its consumer news offering, she added: “We’ve had a trade policy product in the UK for some time. That really grew out of Brexit coverage. But there are obviously lots of other policy areas that, globally, Politico covers very well, that we weren’t covering from a Westminster perspective, or a British government perspective…

“We felt our sponsors were asking for more, were wanting more from us. There was an opportunity in the market here to do a bit more with them.

“And similarly, on the policy side, subscribers wanted more from Westminster, and we felt we could provide it — there seems to be a gap in the market for really strong policy coverage that’s infused with politics.”

Day confirmed that the tripled headcount Anderlini promised referred specifically to editorial staff, “but of course as we add products and journalists, we also need salespeople and lots of other support staff”.

Press Gazette tracked at least 1,000 planned redundancies across US and UK media in January. What has allowed Politico to expand while others were facing cuts?

“I think our focus on a very clearly defined readership and our focus on really strong journalism — trying to do journalism in a way that no one else is doing, to be the best at the things that we do,” Day said.

She added: “We’ve been extremely focused in the way that we’ve grown, and we’ve also been very focused both on the journalistic side and on the commercial side. So the two have grown hand in hand, and I think that’s been critical — we haven’t had one side running ahead of the other.”

Does that mean the “badly-needed” new office was forthcoming?

“I’ve been viewing offices in the last few weeks… All of my team keep asking me because we are very much running out of space. But there is one in the works.”

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