Seven’s The Nightly enters top news site rankings while The Daily Telegraph falls off the map

In a significant achievement for the masthead launched in early 2024, Seven West Media’s The Nightly has entered the iris top 20 news rankings for the first time. The rankings are keenly awaited on a monthly basis by audience editors and data nerds in newsrooms across the country and run by pollsters Ipsos, with the public rankings typically limited to the top 20 Australian news sites, excluding weather and aggregators.
The Nightly crept into 20th place with an audience of 3.07 million people. Atop the list was ABC News, holding onto the lead it snatched from News Corp’s digital masthead news.com.au in September last year with an audience of 12.41 million people.
While data outside of the top 20 is not published publicly, the Ipsos rankings matter to top brass at Seven West, and in a press release last year the company crowed about beating The Australian Financial Review and being hot on the heels of The Australian.
“Just seven months after it launched, The Nightly now sits just below The Australian on the news website rankings, and several places higher than The Australian Financial Review,” the release from September 2024 read.
Seven West rules Western Australia’s media market, and The Nightly’s February results will be celebrated in its outpost Sydney offices. The attention on WA in the lead-up to the state election earlier this month, and ahead of the looming federal election in May, may have been key to recent ranking improvements, although sister paper The West Australian has also been slowly progressing up the rankings for some time now. The West Australian ranked 15th for the month of February, up from 16th in January and 18th in December 2024. It’s worth noting the paper serves as the main outlet covering the local Fremantle Dockers and West Coast Eagles AFL clubs, whose men’s seasons commenced in early March.
Improvements for The Nightly alongside its sister publications are perhaps not unusual — analysis undertaken by Crikey in October 2024 found that the vast bulk of The Nightly’s online referrals came from Facebook accounts other than The Nightly’s own, with Seven West-owned Facebook pages from sister publications like PerthNow and The West Australian promoting articles from The Nightly as much as they do their own.
Elsewhere, News Corp’s premier Sydney tabloid, The Daily Telegraph, has crashed out of the rankings altogether. Having cracked the top 10 in April 2024, the Telegraph barely scraped into the rankings in May, and sat at 17th by January 2025. It is nowhere to be seen in the latest rankings, and research published by the University of Canberra last year found that in a survey asking about trust in news outlets covering 14 major Australian news brands, The Daily Telegraph ranked dead last, as well as last of all the News Corp brands surveyed.
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