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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Biggest news publishers on Tiktok | Spectator's art title Apollo adds digital archive
Plus Metropolis CEO Robert Marr on career journey ‘from finance bro to media guy’
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 19 August.
🧑🎨 September will mark two years since Sir Paul Marshall bought The Spectator and saved it from the even more drawn-out sale process that The Telegraph went through until earlier this summer.
But going slightly under the radar in The Spectator deal was monthly art magazine Apollo (often given one mention and no further reference in the coverage, including at Press Gazette).
I have now hopefully made up for that omission by speaking to Apollo editor Edward Behrens about the state of play at the profitable title.
Apollo has just launched a premium subscription tier based around its newly-digitised magazine archive.
Behrens also spoke about how Apollo has proved slightly protected from the Google AI changes due to its niche position. If the stuff it covers isn’t included in AI model training data, people still need to go to them directly.
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🎬 Earlier this year we reported that Tiktok’s owner Bytedance was the fastest-growing website publisher in the UK by engagement time, with minutes spent on its platform growing 30% year on year in April.
The Daily Mail is the runaway Tiktok success here. It added 16.6 million to its main news account since August 2024, totalling 26.5 million followers, and that doesn’t even include its family of other pages.
The Daily Mail didn’t appear to be a leader in our analysis of young audiences to UK newsbrands last week, coming in just below average on percentage of its audience aged under 35 and with just 4% of time spent on its platforms (website/app/syndication partners) coming from that group.
But that data didn’t include social platforms and the Daily Mail is no doubt expecting that Tiktok reach to be a long-term gain for its brand as the next generation of news consumers come through.
Anecdotally, when we’ve had interns into the Press Gazette office in recent years, as well as from other young people who have had the pleasure of being quizzed by me on their news diets, the Daily Mail on Tiktok has repeatedly been mentioned.
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👨💼 And finally, Metropolis Group CEO Robert Marr is our sixth What I’ve Learned interviewee.
If you’re interested in how other leaders think, this is definitely one for you.
He speaks about going through three transformations in 15 years, the shift from unknown eyeballs to known audiences of decision makers, and why he once really should have invested in getting an interim CTO.
Personally, I didn’t know he was once a “finance bro” or that we’d be citing Margaret Thatcher so soon into this series!
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