The Youth Distribution Index
Benchmarking nine UK news publishers on the distribution-platform reach they're building among 18–34 year olds, weighted against their website audience.
A single number per publisher: website monthly visits divided by an aggregated, age-weighted distribution-platform following. Lower index = stronger relative reach where 18–34s actually live online. Web visits come from Ipsos iris (April 2026); platform weights from the Ofcom News Consumption Survey; followers from Press Gazette rankings and live profile counts.
Of the nine titles, only BBC News and the Daily Mail have built distribution-platform audiences remotely proportional to their website reach — and the gap between them has narrowed sharply, with the Mail now within striking distance of BBC at the top of the index. The Mail's TikTok-led strategy stands out (26.2m followers on the main account); everyone outside those two is web-heavy, with the Daily Express and Daily Mirror showing the largest gaps.
Headlines The four numbers that frame everything below.
The Index, ranked Click any column to re-sort. The “Index” column is the headline metric: lower is better.
| Publisher | Web visits (m) | Youth-wtd distribution (m) | Index | Social ÷ Web |
|---|
Visual breakdown Side-by-side audience comparison and the index ranking.
Web vs. youth-weighted distribution
Index — strength of youth distribution
Where each title plays Followers on each platform (millions). Darker shade = larger audience.
How the weights are derived Ofcom News Consumption Survey: % of each age band who use the platform for news, normalised to 100%.
How the index is built A single benchmark per publisher: website reach divided by an age-weighted following on the platforms where 18–34s actually consume news.
Methodology in five steps
- Establish each platform's relevance to 18–34s. The percentage of 18–24s and 25–34s using each platform for news, sourced from the Ofcom News Consumption Survey 2024 and 2025.
- Combine the two age bands. 50/50 weighting by default to produce a single “youth news-use” score per platform. The interactive controls let you skew the weighting toward 18–24s or 25–34s.
- Normalise to 100%. Each platform's combined score is divided by the total to give a normalised weight — the platform's share of overall youth news consumption.
- Compute the youth-weighted distribution benchmark. For each publisher, multiply their following on each platform by that platform's normalised weight and sum — producing a single comparable benchmark of effective youth reach.
- Calculate the index. Website monthly visits divided by the youth-weighted distribution benchmark. Lower = stronger relative reach where 18–34s spend their time. We split by gender where the underlying source data permits.