Sky News Australia videos watched more than 1.3 billion times in the past 12 months

Sky News Australia’s presence both on screen and online has boomed in the past year as the hunger for breaking news surges during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sky News chief executive officer Paul Whittaker: ‘Many people have discovered our content during the pandemic and have stuck with us.’

Viewers seeking breaking news, up-to-date information and analysis on the pandemic has helped “turbo charge” Sky News Australia audiences, with more than 1.3 billion videos watched across the channel’s digital platforms in the past 12 months.

In a new report commissioned by Sky, an online survey compiled by Hoop Group quizzed 7000 Australians and showed a surge in viewers tuning into Sky News, visiting its website or watching videos on global platforms Facebook and YouTube.

The report showed in June alone Sky News videos were viewed 95.6 million times on YouTube (up 248 per cent on June last year), 22.3 million times on Facebook (up 170 per cent) and video views on its skynews.com.au website climbed to five million (up 118 per cent).

In addition to this Sky News videos were viewed 10.6 million times on News Corp Australia websites (up 30 per cent).

Sky News Australia chief executive Paul Whittaker said audience numbers had been “turbo charged” during the pandemic, explaining “many people have discovered our content during the pandemic and have stuck with us”.

“The big change in this business has been we’ve moved in a quite a deliberate strategic way from a linear broadcast business to a truly multimedia platform business,” he said. “What we are seeing ­increasingly is people coming to us across other platforms, the Foxtel audience is still strong – more than a quarter of our ­audience this survey find us in this traditional way but increasingly people are finding us across digital platforms.”

Mr Whittaker said “appointment viewing” was subsiding and many viewers are chasing “news when it’s live”.

“What’s interesting is there’s big spikes in audience numbers with the 11am Gladys (Berejiklian) briefing or the 10am Annastacia Palaszczuk briefing or whatever time Daniel Andrews does his press conferences,” he said.

During Sydney’s lockdown, which started on June 26, the average Sydney viewer audience is up by 70 per cent compared to the 2021 year-to-date average.

Sky News Australia has more than 1.8 million YouTube subscribers, 28 per cent higher than ABC News which has 1.4 million subscribers. Sky has more than 1.1 million Facebook followers.

Mr Whittaker said there was a “hunger for accurate, credible and timely information”.

“Because of lockdown you've effectively got a captive audience so because people are locked down at home they are sitting there in isolation and wondering what is going on,” he said.