Was the Brexit bounce just a bounce for UK newspaper sites?

The surge in traffic to UK Newspaper sites in the run-up to and following the Brexit vote was not a turning point for the online fortunes of traditional newspaper publishers but rather just short-lived bounce.

The Mail Online which saw an 8% rise in daily unique browsers in June, taking it above 15 million, fell back by 1.2% while The Guardian lost the momentum of its 15% rise and fell back below 10 million daily browsers.

The Telegraph and The Independent (now exclusively online) saw similar declines in traffic. While publishers got very excited about spikes in traffic it was never going to be sustainable. Brexit was a big, once in a lifetime story – but as with every big news story was never going to hold the general public’s interest indefinitely.

It’s hard to build a business model around once in a lifetime events. The bad news for UK publishers is the spike and subsequent decline in traffic came during a number of other big news stories including the Euro 2016 football tournament, the Nice terror attacks and the build-up to The Rio Olympic Games.

June, July and August have all been big news months. It will be interesting to see how the bounce evens out over a couple of slower news periods.

Other factors outside of the publishers control may see gains made during Brexit slide back even further including the recent changes to Facebook’s algorithm which prioritises posts from friends rather than publishers.

One exception to the Brexit Bounce came from The Mirror Online who continued to enjoy growth during July, reporting a 5% increase in browsers taking their daily audience to 5.3 million.

Highlighting the reasons for The Mirror;s continued success, Mirror Online editorial director Pete Picton told journalists: “It’s pleasing that Mirror Online is a source for a variety of news, with no single topic propelling us to the record number in July. Instead, we saw consistent big audiences spread across a number of stories.”