X sees the largest audience sink in top 25 website publishers in the UK

X (past Chirp) saw the largest audience sink among the 25 largest website publishers in the UK between May 2024 and May 2025.

The latest Ipsos Iris data puts X Corp on a monthly UK user base of 20.6 million in May, a decrease of 12% compared to May 2024, making it the 24th largest online publisher in the UK.

X also saw the largest reduction in time, with total minutes in May down year to year by 34% to 4 billion (which means it was still the ninth largest of that metric).

At the same time, Reach remains the only commercial news publisher presented in the top-ten ranking in terms of monthly reach. Mail Metro Media is the largest commercial news publisher with a certain margin in terms of time with its websites.

X saw a lot of users choose to leave last year, with some departure in August when the owner Elon Musk watered into British politics in the wake of the Southport attack and subsequent riots, and one Further “exodus” in November When Donald Trump won the US presidential election with Musk first in the heart of his campaign and then his government through the new department for the effectiveness of the government.

The recent Reuters Institute Digital News report indicated a political change between X users since Musk’s takeover of October 2022: In the United Kingdom, 29% of the left-handed respondents used for news in 2021, down to 16% this year, but among right-wing people’s use went from 10% to 18%.

News publishers have seen referral traffic from X Plunge to negligible levels as the platform provides less visibility for posts containing links.

The largest audience increase in the past year was at Temu owner Whaleco, an increase of 42% to 29.7 million.

Four of the five best website publishers in the UK are US-owned.

At the same time, Reddit continues to see an audience increase after Google Algorithm updates meant that users’ posts are now often appearing on search results pages. Reddit seems to have been much more visible in Google’s search results since February 2024 when its owner reached an annual business agreement of $ 60 million that enabled Google to use its content to train AI models.

Reddit was the eleventh largest media organization in the UK in May with an audience of 31.2 million, an increase of 27% from year to year.

Reddit was just behind X in total minutes spent (3.7 billion, an increase of 18% year to year). It also saw an increase of 11% in the side views to 871.1 million.

Tiktok Owner Bythadance saw their British audience grow by 14% to 29.4 million during a period when the forced closure or sales in the United States is in Limbo.

Bythadance had the third highest sum of monthly minutes spent (SEK 27.2 billion, an increase of 17%), behind meta (112.8 billion, an increase of 20%) and the alphabet (111.6 billion, an increase of 11%).

The BBC remained the largest news organization with an audience of 42.2 million behind the four major technical giants (Google Owner Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft).

Reach Saw their audience reach grow by 4%compared to May 2024 to 36.6 million but Mail Metro Media (29.2 million, down 1%) and News UK (29.2 million, down 2%) both saw a small decline.

Even in the top 25, the independent and evening standard (a combined audience of 24.3 million, an increase of 2%) and the Guardian (23.7 million, was an increase of 10%).

Although he was the largest commercial publisher after audience size, Reach was the sixth largest of total minutes spent with his content in May.

Mail, Metro and in Paper Publisher Mail Media saw 1.5 billion minutes spent (down 9% year to year) while Reach had 689.8 million in its network of national and regional locations (stable compared to May 2024).

When you look at the time with websites, the UK’s owned publisher is removing third place when it comes to total time on the net behind publishers whose owners are based in the US and China.

Several publishers fell just off the top 25 online organization list ranked by monthly UK audience reach:

• Future – 19.4 million
• Immediate media – 19 million
• Yahoo – 19 million
• Telegraph Media Group – 18.9 million
• ITV – 18.6 million

When he looked at regional news publishers, NewSquest was 16.2 million and the national world was 15 million.

Ipsos Iris uses a mix of results from a 10,000-strong survey panel and website-based user tracking to provide its estimates for online range.

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