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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Axel Springer’s £7m loan to Telegraph before takeover | Traffic drops across US news sites
Plus second ‘overwhelming victory’ for Mail publisher in Prince Harry privacy case
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Monday, 24 August.
🤝 It’s no wonder that Axel Springer and The Telegraph buddied up in March when the former bought Telegraph Media Group Holdings for £575m – it’s now emerged that Axel Springer handed the company a £7m loan in early 2026, months before agreeing to take it over.
The Telegraph was bought as it swung into negative cash flow, its latest accounts reveal, with revenue was down 2% to £273m in the year to 28 December per its latest accounts. Declines were happening across print circulation and advertising, but print still made up 53% of revenue.
It’s the second time Axel Springer has gone to buy the paper – the first time was in 2004 when the Barclay family outbid it. Its successful bid this time around could lead to a sunnier financial future for the paper.
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📉 Our monthly traffic ranking for the 50 biggest news websites in the US is a really useful tool for tracking short-term changes, but it’s harder to see longer-term trends.
UK editor Charlotte Tobitt has dug into Similarweb data over three years to find out how the picture has really changed for the household names of news.
Combined traffic to the ten biggest news websites is down by almost a fifth compared to three years ago and a third compared to 2024, when a lot of sites peaked. That’s matched across a wider sample of sites, with the top 50 together down 37% compared to 2024.
Read on for Charlotte’s full data bonanza, and if you spot an angle on the traffic that you’d like to see send an email to charlotte.tobitt@pressgazette.co.uk.
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💸 And Associated Newspapers marked its second “overwhelming victory” on Friday after a High Court judge ruled that Prince Harry and other unsuccessful claimants must pay a higher than usual proportion of the publisher’s costs.
The publisher of the Daily Mail spent far more than it expected fighting the case – £18.6m more than was agreed as a reasonable budget by the court – racking up a total £34.5m in costs.
The court dismissed all 97 allegations against the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.
In his judgment on how costs should be assessed, Mr Justice Nicklin said that the way legal teams for Prince Harry and the other claimants ran the case was “unreasonable to a high degree”, and that “allegations of the utmost seriousness were advanced before the evidential foundation for many of them had been established”.
Claimants have been ordered to make an interim payment of £9.5m by 28 August.