Our events team was in Krakow last week for WAN-IFRA’s World News Congress. In addition to catching up with industry friends and partners and sharing the latest product updates at Chartbeat and Tubular, the highlight of our conference was Evan Gillis’ presentation on winning over multi-platform audiences.
Using data from Chartbeat’s global network of publishers and Tubular Labs’ massive social video database, Evan walked the crowd through traffic and engagement trends, the opportunity for publishers on social, and the top topics across news sites and social media. We’ll recap the presentation below for those who weren’t in attendance.
Traffic and engagement trends in Europe
When looking at weekly pageviews in Europe, the first thing we notice is that traffic is rising. After peaking in November around the time of the US elections, European publishers generated about 4 billion pageviews a week in Q1, up from 3.7 billion in Q4. Increasing traffic, in and of itself, is a great thing, but it can also be a missed opportunity if content isn’t optimized for engagement. As traffic rises, it’s always a good idea to analyze how much time visitors are spending actively engaging with content to be able to make informed decisions about where efforts are matching audience attention.
In Europe in Q1, the Average Engaged Time was 29 seconds. Sweden had the highest engagement at 44 seconds while Italy, France, and Portugal lagged behind the average at 23-24 seconds. Publishers in the event’s host country, Poland, also performed well with an above average 37 seconds of Average Engaged time.
No matter where a publisher falls on this leaderboard, there’s always room for improvement, and two data-backed strategies we recommend to increase engagement are:
- Increase word count — we’ve found that engaged time continues to rise for articles up to 2,000 words.
- Incorporate live updates into static articles to keep content fresh and relevant.
Where are readers coming from?
Another important consideration for understanding how to engage readers is where they’re coming from. When we look at traffic by referral source, we notice a few trends. First, at the top of the graph, we see that Internal traffic is increasing, an indication that efforts to encourage readers to recirculate to other pages is working.
When we focus on traffic originating from outside European news sites, we also notice a small decline in traffic from search engines. While this is only a 1% decline from quarter to quarter, we know that the impact of AI on search is a growing concern, and it’s something we will continue to monitor closely with Chartbeat so we can keep publishers up to date on any changes as they happen and provide data-backed suggestions to help navigate them.
The Next Big Opportunity: Social Video
While owned and operated websites are critical for audience engagement, the opportunity on social video is massive, growing every day, and creating real opportunities for news publishers. Between March 2024 and March 2025, for example, nearly 4 billion videos were uploaded by 60 million creators. It’s an enormous volume of content, and within it are strategic opportunities for news publishers all over the world, especially around timely, high-interest topics like immigration, elections, and war, which we’ll investigate further below. First, let’s look at two of the most impactful social video platforms for publishers.
One platform publishers are no stranger to is YouTube. Uploads to this platform rose by 2.5% from the last 2 months of 2024 to the first 2 months of 2025. In the same time period, views increased 10%, demonstrating that this platform is still delivering a solid viewership boost compared to uploads.
TikTok is another platform offering major opportunities as views consistently outpace uploads. While news publishers may still be learning the ins and outs of the platform, uploads here increased by 11% in the first two months of the year, a sign they’re catching on to its potential, and a pace we recommend continuing.
Winning on TikTok: What the Daily Mail Gets Right
When we zoom in on creators in the news space, Daily Mail leads the pack on TikTok, far outpacing competitors like BBC News, Metro, Brut FR, and ITV News. Simply put, Daily Mail posted a lot (more than double BBC News’ posts, for example). Let’s take a closer look at the Daily Mail content strategy to see what else they’re doing to win viewership.
Their TikTok strategy focuses on:
- High-frequency posting
- Coverage of major figures like Donald Trump as well as breaking news like wildfires and airplane incidents
- Consistent use of the #dailymail hashtag, so much so that Tubular has categorized it as a news topic in its own right
Their approach demonstrates the value of branding and topic consistency in building loyal audiences on social platforms.
What topics drive engagement across platforms?
According to Chartbeat data, from November through March, Donald Trump was far and away the most popular topic on news sites, racking up more than 800 billion engaged minutes. By contrast, articles related to Keir Starmer and Volodymyr Zelensky accrued 11 and 9.5 billion engaged minutes, respectively. The war between Russia and Ukraine was another engaging topic, amassing 576 billion minutes of engaged time.
When we look at popular topics on social video, we notice that TikTok audiences engage differently. While Trump was also a top topic on TikTok (Daily Mail’s top video covered the lifting of the brief TikTok ban in the US in early 2025), the Russia-Ukraine war was absent from TikTok’s top topics during the same period.
This divergence highlights an essential insight: audiences use different platforms for different purposes. What works on a homepage or YouTube might not land on TikTok — and vice versa.
Key takeaways for publishers
To summarize, here are four strategic takeaways to guide audience development efforts:
- Match engagement strategy to traffic growth. As more people visit owned and operated sites, make sure to capture and keep their attention with quality content and formats that drive engaged time.
- Keep investing in recirculation. It’s paying off, increasing depth of visit and improving the likelihood of return traffic.
- Lean into TikTok. With high viewership and relatively low competition, there’s major upside, especially for early movers.
- Tailor content by platform. Use real-time data to understand what works where. For instance, war content performs strongly on news sites and YouTube but lags behind on TikTok. Plan strategies accordingly.
If there’s one idea to remember, it’s this: the best audience strategies are dynamic and platform-specific. With the right data and the ability to act on it, publishers can meet their audience where they are, and unlock real engagement and revenue growth in the process.
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