National news consumption has soared to a record high with an extra 6.6 million daily digital readers according to the latest data released by PAMCo.

More than 25 million people are now turning to digital national news brands every single day following a surge of 6.6 million readers, or 35%, compared to the previous year (April – March 2019 v April – March 2020).

The numbers, which include the first three months of the year when the global coronavirus pandemic began to take hold, show an increase in overall audience numbers across all metrics with an especially sharp rise in daily readership.

Across print and digital, national news readership grew by 18% to surpass 30 million daily readers for the first time. The data also shows that monthly and weekly national readership grew to 48 million and 45 million, respectively.

When combined with the UK’s leading regional titles across both print and digital those numbers rise to 49 million monthly, 48 weekly and 40 million daily readers – an extra 7.4 million readers across the news sector are turning to trusted news brands every single day.

The 40 million daily readership figure is 15 million more daily unique visitors than Google and 7.5 million ahead of Facebook.

Tracy De Groose, executive chair of Newsworks, said: “As the global pandemic took hold at the beginning of the year millions more readers turned to sources of news, analysis and information they knew they could trust. And encouragingly for our news brands and our journalism this was at a more frequent rate than ever before. All the indications suggest that this more regular daily demand for high quality journalism has continued into the second quarter of the year.”

The Publishers Audience Measurement Company (PAMCo), is the governing body which oversees audience measurement for the published media industry. We are responsible for the new joint industry currency (JIC) called PAMCo – Audience Measurement for Publishers in place of NRS data.