One of News Corps’ biggest weapons in its dominance of the Australian media landscape is the military-grade rigour with which the company treats social media. Its best performing mastheads have significant resources dedicated specifically to social media and growth, with teams laser-focused on one thing: engagement.
On this, Sky News Australia has been leading the charge over the past five years after a shift in its digital strategy. The conservative broadcaster’s engagement peaked on Facebook in September 2020 with more than 800,000 weekly interactions, outstripping the likes of ABC News, 7News and 9 News in October of that year.
Sky News Australia quickly became a force to be reckoned with in the digital space, cultivating a massive online following despite relatively modest television ratings compared to its free-to-air competitors. The company went from having fewer than 600,000 followers on Facebook in July 2019 to cracking 1 million by 2021. Today it sits at 1.5 million.
Despite these increases in followers, however, Sky News Australia’s online influence is rapidly deteriorating. In March, Sky News Australia dropped out of the top 20 Australian news websites, according to Ipsos rankings, after peaking as high as 11th in May 2023.
Meanwhile, on Facebook, figures from analytics tool CrowdTangle show that while its follower counts continue to rise, weekly interactions sit at around 200,000, a shadow of the brand’s performance in 2020 and less than half of its 2023 peak of around 500,000.
The brand’s social media strategy has been dominated during this period by video: 58% of its Facebook interactions since July 2019 have been from Facebook videos, typically short clips of its flagship programs such as Bolt, Credlin and Paul Murray Live.
This is despite Sky News Australia having been posting more on Facebook since 2019 — by January last year, the page was sitting at more than 6,000 posts a month. Notably, this means Sky’s interaction rate — its interactions per follower (a key metric for newsrooms as to how much readers are engaging with content — has plummeted. In September 2020, it peaked at just over 0.15%, and sits at around 0.01% now, even dropping from 0.03% in November.
Some of Sky’s most successful social media posts of all time came in a highly turbulent news period, such as when Victoria was contending with COVID-19 lockdowns, and the Black Lives Matter protests were gripping the United States.
The Atlantic reports that traffic decline on Facebook has been seen across a number of conservative American media outlets. Fox News, Sky’s stateside stablemate, lost 22% of traffic in February compared to the same month in 2020, according to Comscore data. That works out to being down to the tune of 23 million visitors.
The Atlantic reports there was no similarly impactful drop off for liberal-minded competitors, positing that conservative media might be particularly dependent on social media referrals.
While Meta has made moves in Australia to turn off the algorithmic tap when it comes to news on Facebook, the decline at Sky News Australia has not been reflected in its relatively successful YouTube offering, which sits at 4.05 million subscribers, more than double what it had in June 2021 at 1.67 million. This is despite copping a strike and a temporary ban from the streaming giant in 2021 over posting pandemic misinformation.
After publication of this article, a spokesperson for Sky News Australia contacted Crikey with the following statement:
“This analysis does not disclose the fact that engagement on Facebook news pages has declined across all Australian media organisations. This has been widely reported including by Crikey. Sky News Australia remains the number one most engaging news channel page on Facebook, with +95% more interactions on posts than ABC News. To put in further context, Sky News Australia had more engagement with its content on Facebook on Monday May 6 than Crikey has had during the year to date.”
