GB News were jubilant after preliminary figures showed them beating both the BBC News channel and Sky News for average viewership in several key slots in July, with head of programming Ben Briscoe saying: “This is a seismic moment, not just for us, but for British broadcasting.”
But is the Earth really moving at figures that show the channel for far right conspiracy theorists remains very much a minority interest? GB News did pull in an average audience of 80,600, but the main news bulletins on BBC and ITV are viewed by 3m-plus each day. Meanwhile, both the BBC News channel and Sky News have a larger weekly reach – more than double in the case of the former.
Suggested Reading
The GB News pundit who wants to deport Heathrow
The channel dubbed GBeebies continues to attract fewer viewers than kids’ favourites CBeebies, as well as the likes of Comedy Central, Really, Legend, ITV Quiz and many more.
Unlike many channels with a similar audience which simply show reruns and old movies and operate at low cost, GB News is hugely expensive to run. It reported losses of £33.4m last year and has been spending heavily on growing its news website at a time when the bottom has fallen out of the digital advertising market and user numbers are being hit by Google showing AI-generated search results to people looking for specific news stories rather than sending them to third-party websites.
Not many businesses could afford to run this way – but then not many are bankrolled by the right wing media magnate Paul Marshall, who seems to believe losing tens of millions a year is a fair price to pay to treat viewers to GB News’s diet of highly partisan content.
