Wales Online has leapfrogged its Reach plc stablemates including the Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo to become the UK’s biggest regional news brand for July after an impressive 23pc rise in visitors.
The latest IPSOS figures for regional news websites show the sector broadly maintaining its audience, albeit with a slight dip, with 33.3m users in July compared to 34.9m in the same month in 2025.
Visitor numbers for some of Reach’s other titles were less impressive, however, with numbers for the Manchester Evening News down 27 per cent and the Liverpool Echo seeing a 28 per cent decline.
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The drop in audience for the two big city titles that traditionally sit at or around the top of the regional readership tables allowed Wales Online to take the top spot, with 8.9m visitors in July compared to 7.2m a year earlier.
Wales Online was also the most-viewed site during July, with 35m page views compared to 32m for the MEN and 27m for the Echo.
Page views for the industry as a whole continued to drop, down 27pc year-on-year at 559m as the fallout from Google’s algorithm changes continued to bite.
A number of Newsquest titles bucked the trend, however, and posted big increases in visitor numbers, with the Oxford Mail up 45pc, The Herald up 63pc and Swindon Advertiser up 121pc.
Newsquest’s News and Star also topped the visitor engagement chart, with visits to the Carlisle-focused website averaging an unusual 12.5 minutes, which most titles could only dream of.
The Manchester Evening News, traditionally the table topper, made second place in both the unique users and page views tables, both topped by Wales Online, while the Echo took fifth and third respectively. Competition in the top five came from the usual suspects including The London Evening Standard and Birmingham Mail.
The engagement run-off was somewhat less predictable, with titles from Basingstoke, Stroud, Ipswich and the UK’s official business record The Gazette joining the News and Star in the top five.
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