Data · Insight
The Emerging Audience Index
A quarterly, independently-scored benchmark of how 26 UK media brands reach and engage 18–34 audiences — across their websites and their social distribution.
The Emerging Audience Index assesses UK media brands and their ability to attract and retain a younger audience — newspapers, broadcasters, magazines and digital-native publishers — against a single, consistent methodology using independently sourced data.
Each brand is scored on three equally weighted pillars:
- Audience — the proportion of each brand’s website visitors aged 18–34.
- Engagement — how younger visitors behave on site versus older ones, across bounce rate, pages per session and visit duration.
- Distribution — the brand’s own social presence, built from three composite measures: Scale, Breadth, and Performance.
All three pair a genuinely young audience with visitors who engage almost as well as older readers — Sky Sports’ younger visitors leave just 0.2% sooner. Social distribution adds scale; on-site experience cements the lead.
TechRadar draws the youngest audience in the study — with just six social accounts, one of the smallest footprints in the panel. Good Food (39.8%) and Tom’s Guide (38.6%) follow; none are traditional news brands.
Every brand loses younger visitors faster than older ones — the question is by how much. At the top 6, visits are just 2.5% shorter; at the bottom 6, 38.5% shorter. Holding younger visitors is what separates the leaders from the rest.
Let’s talk about winning your younger audience.
Get in touch →| Brand | Category | Domain | Overall ▼ | Audience ▼ | Engagement ▼ | Distribution ▼ |
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The panel includes both traditional news publishers and adjacent digital, magazine and niche brands, to compare distribution and engagement strategies across the wider media landscape.
Distribution vs. audience
Does social investment convert to a younger website audience? Hover over any brand to see its scores.
Three pillars, equally weighted
How we calculate this
- Audience, Engagement and Distribution carry equal weight in the overall score.
- Distribution is built from three equally-weighted composites — Scale, Breadth, and Performance — rather than the single measure behind Audience or the three behind Engagement. Topping out requires being strong on all three at once, and each composite’s calibration allows headroom for future growth, so even the strongest brand’s Distribution score sits well below its Audience or Engagement score (currently 64 vs. 96 and 94 at the top of the panel). That reflects a broader, stricter test, not weaker social performance.
- Website data comes from Similarweb, on a consistent 12-month rolling window for every brand.
- Social data is pulled directly from each brand’s public TikTok, X, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube accounts. Nothing is self-reported.
- The Index covers 26 brands today, with new additions each quarter.
- Scores are recalculated and republished quarterly.
- New platforms may be added over time; changes are not applied to past scores.