On 26 March 2016, the final paper edition of The Independent was printed – since then it is available online only. The Independent’s owner, Evgeny Lebedev, justified this step by saying that the future was digital, and the media had to adjust. For us this step is enough reason to look at The Independent’s Google News performance as this traffic source should be even more relevant for a “digital only” publisher. We will look at both the Google News visibility of the past quarter and at the Google News Boxes visibility from January until the end of March.

The following graph shows the Top 10 news players in Google News in the UK. Position 1 is held by theguardian.com most of the time with a visibility of around 6 percent, followed by dailymail.co.uk with an average 4.5 percent visibility, telegraph.co.uk with a visibility of 3 to 4 percent, and bbc.co.uk with fairly steady numbers around 3 percent. Slightly further behind are mirror.co.uk and independent.co.uk. Both have a Google News visibility of about 2 percent. Even though places 5 and 6 seem fairly secure since there is a good gap between The Independent and the top 10 news players (ft.com, liverpoolecho.co.uk, reuters.com, and express.co.uk), The Independent does have room for improvement.

Independent.co.uk and mirror.co.uk are on position 5 respectively 6 regarding their visibility in Google News.

Which numbers does independent.co.uk reach in the Google News Boxes regarding visibility? It looks similar here for The Independent. It holds, like in Google News, places 5 respectively 6 along with mirror.co.uk. On can see straight away though, that mirror.co.uk is a bit stronger than The Independent, because it reached the 5^th place regarding its visibility in the Google News Boxes most of February and March. We do see a slight uptrend of The Independent. While its visibility was between 7 and 8 percent between January and the start of March, it was able to reach numbers between 9.28 and 9.83 percent from 14 March on.

BBC.co.uk and theguardian.com are leading the Google News Boxes Ranking

We will see whether The Independent’s figures will rise further in the future. It can be said though, that independent.co.uk does have room for improvement in both Google News and the Google News Boxes. As it now focuses on online we will see if it will be able to improve its visibility figures.