By Selma Stern, Independent Advisor, and Pete Doucette, Senior Managing Director, Mather
Mather’s inaugural German News Media Audience Benchmark recorded a staggering result: German news brands grew audience +13% year-over-year in April, while US brands fell more than 17% in the same window. Built on Similarweb, Listener and Sophi data across 44 German news brands, the benchmark found the majority of them posting positive year-over-year growth. The gap between Germany and the US widened through the first quarter of 2026.
Since the report launched, we’ve been analyzing why this is happening. There are a few structural reasons: a different election cycle, a later arrival of AI overviews, more Android phones (and therefore more Google Discover traffic). But these macro trends don’t explain why the recovery is concentrated in regional publishers, why it shows up in engagement and not just reach, or why Germany rebounded inside the same platform environment US media blames for its own decline.
An independent INMA analysis of DACH publishers’ own first-party data points the same direction as ours. INMA’s Grzegorz Piechota put it best when we compared notes: “They are lucky in a way, but they also do something with their luck.”
We have four hypotheses for what’s actually going on. One is sheer luck, one has to do with good choices made in the past, and two might travel.
