The BBC News Channel and Sky News both reached more viewers in July than in any month since October 2022.
The uptick for viewers to the UK’s two biggest TV news channels came in a month that saw a general election in the UK, an assassination attempt on former US president Donald Trump, England reaching the final of the Euros again, Sky News itself being the victim of the Crowdstrike outage and the horrific Southport knife attack and ensuing public disorder.
The BBC News Channel’s audience was up by 22% compared to June, at 12.8 million, while Sky News was up 25% to 10 million.
Compared to July last year, they were up by 25% and 16% respectively.
It was the first time Sky News has crossed the 10 million mark in a month since October 2022, according to BARB’s broadcast viewing data, making it the most viewed Sky-branded channel for the month.
Sky News also beat the BBC’s channel for viewers on five days in the month, according to its executive chair David Rhodes, including almost doubling the BBC’s audience on the day of the attempted Trump assassination.
Citing Sky News’ internal Adobe metrics, Rhodes also claimed the brand reached a total digital audience of 37.6 million users in July, more than 50% above its monthly average in 2024 so far across its website and app.
Rhodes said in a statement to Press Gazette: “Coming out of the general election, audiences came for US politics, sport – even our own experience of the global IT outage seemed to deliver what we call ‘the full story, first’.”
