News Corp’s Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph has plummeted in the latest news website rankings, having cracked the top 10 the previous month to barely scraping into the published rankings at 19th in May.
The May 2024 rankings were released by pollsters Ipsos this week, and show The Daily Telegraph dropped in audience share by 5.7%, the biggest drop of any website in the top 20 for that month.
The rankings, published monthly, are keenly awaited by newsrooms and are a point of pride for those atop the list.
The Daily Telegraph has consistently trailed its Victorian counterpart the Herald Sun in the rankings over the past six months. The tabloid didn’t crack the top 20 in January this year but shot up the rankings to 12th in February on the back of almost 1 million more readers, only to fall back down to 20th in March.
It’s not the only notable movement in the rankings. For the past 17 consecutive months, the top spot has been held by News Corp’s digital flagship, news.com.au, with ABC News consistently ranking second. The gap between news.com.au and the ABC has sat between 6-7% in recent months, but closed to 4.2% in March and just 0.6% in April. This month, that gap has narrowed to just 0.2% of audience reach — a mere 46,000 readers.
The dominance of news.com.au coincided with the tenure of recently departed editor-in-chief Lisa Muxworthy, who Crikey revealed was made redundant as part of the company’s recent major corporate restructuring.
It comes after a month of disappointing public metrics for News Corp, with the annual digital news report published this month by the University of Canberra finding The Daily Telegraph was the least trusted of the 14 Australian news brands covered, with only 42% of respondents trusting the newspaper compared to 65% who trusted public broadcaster SBS. The Telegraph also ranked lowest among all the News Corp brands rated in the survey.
Of the five News Corp brands included in the survey, four made up the lowest four ranked brands, with The Australian the lone exception. With a trust rating of 50%, the national broadsheet ranked equal with Guardian Australia and above The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
