For decades, Britain’s red-top tabloids have held a powerful grip on the national discourse, swinging elections with their endorsements and shaping celebrity careers.
But in an era of social media feeds, AI summaries and influencer-driven content, media executives are asking how the traditional British tabloids can thrive – and even survive – against digital rivals.
“There is a supreme irony,” said former Sun editor David Yelland. “It’s very difficult to be a tabloid disrupter in a world that has become so tabloid.”
Recent results show an industry under pressure. Companies House filings on Tuesday showed that the holding company for The Sun reported a pretax loss of £53 million in the year to the end of June 2025, far steeper than its £18 million loss the previous year. Revenue fell from £296 million to £273 million.
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In part, this reflected significant legal costs of £36.7 million related to claims made in the phone-hacking scandal against the Sun and now defunct News of the World.
But the accounts, from Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, also show that the combined print and digital “reach” of the Sun – a measure of the number of adults that actually read it – fell from 26.6 million to 22.2 million last year, according to data from the Publishers Audience Measurement Company (PAMCo).
Meanwhile, the consumer arm of DMGT – which includes the Daily Mail, the i and Metro newspapers as well as New Scientist – last month revealed a drop in revenues of 2 per cent to £600 million (€688 million).
While it returned to an operating profit of £12 million, from a loss of £46 million the year before, it warned that circulation volumes of the paid-for newspapers “are expected to continue to decline”.
The Daily Mail’s combined print and digital reach fell from 25.3 million in the second half of 2024 to 21.7 million in the first half of 2025, according to PAMCo data.
Reach, the third of the UK’s large tabloid owners with national titles such as the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express, posted a 3.7 per cent fall in revenue to £518.4 million in 2025, and a pretax loss of £165.9 million, compared with a profit of £62.8 million the year before.
Analysts say that the traditional British tabloid – a unique mix of entertainment, scoops, sports and gossip – is under threat from global online rivals.
“It’s very competitive,” said Claire Enders, a media analyst. “The audience who wants to hear about celebrities can now hear it from them directly. There are a lot of influencers who have taken the market from mainstream media.”
One former tabloid executive said that tabloids had once been the “internet before the internet”, offering a “diet of everything from punchy opinion to world-class sports and news”.
He added: “Almost all of that is now available on your social media feed for free.”
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The editorial impact of leading newspapers is far from diminished, said Yelland, with the front pages of the Daily Mail and the Sun newspaper still carrying hard-hitting scoops and often leading political debate.
But he said that even if newspaper owners were happy “about the role they play in national life”, the problem was that “the commercial model is what matters”.
“If the revenues are not there to support these newspapers, they will decline and die,” he said.
AI chatbots are scraping and copying content; exclusive stories rarely stay that way in a market where content can be reproduced in seconds
While tabloids have successfully launched websites that attract millions of people every month, executives say the problem has been turning that into money. Digital advertising for print titles has come under pressure, while readers expect much of the content provided by the tabloids to be free online.
One corporate adviser at a national newspaper group said it was a “pivotal” time for tabloid newspapers, with “executives scratching their heads [as to] why, when they are getting gazillions of eyeballs on their websites, they can’t make any money”.
The newspaper industry has seen a steady fall in print circulation over the past two decades, but until relatively recently, media groups have been able to rely on growing digital numbers to underpin confidence in the future.
But publishers are now facing a sharp fall in web traffic from search, given changes to algorithms and the rise of AI-based tools that can provide detailed answers to nuanced queries, with fewer links to other websites. Google’s AI Overview already summarises results without the need to click through to source material.
AI chatbots are scraping and copying content; exclusive stories rarely stay that way in a market where content can be reproduced in seconds.
DMGT said digital advertising revenues decreased last year due to the introduction of Al overviews by search engine providers, resulting in fewer users clicking through to news websites.
The Sun said the approach of social platforms towards news content had led to a fall in its monthly digital audience to 18.7 million in the first half of 2025, from 23.4 million in the same period in 2024.
A report by Enders in April said social media sites such as TikTok and WhatsApp had become “primary spaces” for information, commentary and discussion, showing the extent of the new competition.
“These environments are engineered for sustained engagement - infinite scroll, algorithmic reinforcement and low friction – in contrast to publisher sites,” it said.
News groups are pursuing various routes to try to better monetise their online readership as print circulations continue to fall, hoping to turn readers into subscribers and fighting online rivals across social media channels and YouTube.
Reach has created more than 100 new specialist video roles to compete directly with online influencers to attract social media audiences “and drive audiences back to our websites”.
Some titles, including the Express, the Sun and the Daily Mail, have launched digital subscriptions, offering audiences “ad-lite” access and exclusive content. Reach is targeting more than 75,000 subscribers in 2026, while the Daily Mail has a target of 1 million subscribers by October 2028, from about 400,000 currently.
The Sun said it was investing in video under its Sun Originals banner and had seen more than one billion views a month since December, arguing that the potential for revenues was “significant and scalable”.
An Enders note said that publishers were building up their columnists and star reporters as “creators in their own right”. It pointed to “publisher-owned personalities and episodic formats” as a means to attract and retain paying audiences.
Geordie Greig, editor-in-chief of the digital-only Independent and former editor of the Daily Mail, said there had also been a move by audiences towards quality journalism difficult to replicate by AI-powered platforms. “Today, almost no one under 40 buys print,” he said.
News UK said investments were “focused on formats which will deliver revenues over the long term to create a sustainable future for all of our journalism”.
It added: “The provision of quality news across a range of digital formats is more crucial than ever in these uncertain times.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
