When thinking about the last year a lot comes to mind, but instead of focusing on the stories, we want to take the chance to look at the storytellers who bring the news to us every day.

So, for this year in review analyses, we want to look at the most visible publishers in Google (News) France in 2018. All data is based upon the Trisolute News Dashboard – a one-of-a-kind SEO tool that gives near-real-time data about rankings in Google News and on the Google search engine result page (SERP). To level the playing field and cover most general-interest news topics of 2018, we chose to base the analyses on our general keyword set. This set is based on Google News and Trends topics – but keep in mind that the May redesign of Google News affected the general Google News keywords, making them more pointed toward big general news topics and adapting to Google changes, we followed. However, the keyword set broadened again in the end of the year thanks to our brand new keyword extractor to include more keywords from all categories.

Mobile News Boxes: 20minutes.fr leads during the whole year.

20minutes.fr wins gold all year round.

From June to September, we see a general high for the top department in the mobile News Boxes 2018 in France, with 20minutes.fr reaching a high of 13.44 percent and reaching the most rankings with “donald trump” from our general keyword set in July after having their lowest score in January.

Everybody else stays under the 10 percent mark. Though, leparisien.fr scores mostly above or around 5 percent. Ouest-france.fr‘s visibility takes a different curve than most of the top publishers, with two highs in June and July. On third position is lci.fr, with general great scores overall. Right in the middle is lemonde.fr, with a similar curve as most top publishers. Orange.fr is not the most remarkable publisher until July, but then makes a leap that puts them right in the sweet spot. By the end, the publisher reaches a better score than at the beginning of the year with additional 1.59 percentage points. Lepoint.fr and europe1.fr make a similar leap with the rest of the publishers, while francetvinfo.fr and lefigaro.fr stay between 1.72 and 4.52 percent. While francetvinfo.fr manages to constantly stay above 5 percent, the visibility of the other publishers takes a toll from May onward.

Desktop News Boxes: Publishers are neck and neck.

Lemonde.fr gets the overall highest score in summer.

In the Desktop News Boxes in France 2018, the competition is generally much closer together than in the mobile News Boxes. Here, lemonde.fr and francetvinfo.fr are in front of 20minutes.fr, with both reaching scores above 10 percent. On Positions 4 to 6 are lequipe.fr, lefigaro.fr and leparisien.fr. While all score well in June, lequipe.fr drops quite a bit in August and September with a score of just above 1 percent. Out of the three, lefigaro.fr has the highest score in September with 6.91 percent – and  with most rankings for “hollywood” and “emmanuel macron”. All other publishers reach scores between 1 and 5 percent – while ouest-france.fr, europe1.fr, bfmtv.fr and lepoint.fr begin the year right next to each other, they divert considerably at the end of the year.

Google News: Lefigaro.fr rocks the beginning of 2018.

Lefigaro.fr goes from the top to the middle.

Google News rankings are not based upon keywords, which is why you will not see those changes in the summer months. But, keep in mind that the redesign definitely affected the Google News algorithm, which is clearly seen in the vastly different positions starting in May 2018.

While the highest scoring publisher lefigaro.fr gains 9.25 percent visibility in January, the No. 10 publisher orange.fr reaches only 0.15 percent, but they barely have a 1.19 percent difference at the end of the year. The rest of the playing field also moves more together, but considerably less so. Leparisien.fr, francetvinfo.fr and lemonde.fr all start above five percent, but then they take vastly different routes. 20minutes.fr is one of the few publishers that is on an overall upward trend, reaching a high in June with 6.44 percent. On an ascending curve is bmftv.com. Ouest-france.fr and rtl.fr manage to stay somewhat constant. Unfortunately, lequipe.fr lose nearly half of their visibility over the year.

When we look at the Top 5 in the Google News categories, we see several new publishers. In “Divertissement”: Purepeople.com, melty.fr and public.fr. “Économie”: Lesechos.fr. “Santé”: Pourquoidocteur.fr. “Sciences et technologies”: 01net.com, frandroid.com, jeuxvideo.com, lesnumeriques.com and journaldugeek.com. “Sports”: Le10sport.com, foot01.com and footmercato.com. That makes “Sciences et technologies” by far the most independent category and proves that niche publishers are quite able to make respective gains in their fields, overtaking general-interest top publishers.

AMP share: Most publishers rank with AMP in mobile News Boxes.

Again and again, Google has said that the preferred mobile format is Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, for online publishers, making the site more user-friendly with quicker loading times, but harder in upkeep and less ad-friendly for site owners.

But, we wanted to see just how much this affects the rankings in the mobile News Boxes as the most important SERP element for publishers. Therefore, we looked at the rankings of the Top 20 news publishers in the mobile News Boxes for our general keyword set in 2018, to determine how many of those rankings were shown as AMP by Google. We see that only for one publisher out of twenty – rtl.fr – more than 90 percent of News Box rankings were shown as AMP. For 60 percent of the publishers, more than 80 percent of their rankings were played out as AMP. Another 25 percent had more than 60 percent of their rankings played out as AMP. Surprisingly, for lefigaro.fr only 5 percent of all crawled News Box rankings were shown as AMP by Google. Lemonde.fr and lequipe.fr even had zero AMP rankings over the course of one year. Google still seems to value AMP as an overall asset, but this result is vastly different from the overall higher AMP percentages in Germany, the UK, Switzerland, the U.S. and Australia.

Conclusion