News24 Sport

What is News24 Sport?

News24 Sport is the sport section of News24, the digital news title published by Media24. Media24's corporate site describes News24 as “South Africa's premier breaking news source” bringing readers “the best in politics, opinions, investigations and human-interest stories – including unique video reporting”, under the line “Trusted news. First.”^[3] That is the publisher's characterisation of its own title. Media24's advertising material describes the content scope as running “from politics to sports, lifestyle and multimedia content for all audiences”.^[2]

The title is a subscription business as well as an advertising one. In a non-confidential submission to the Competition Commission's media and digital platforms inquiry, dated 8 December 2023 and amended after a further information request of 14 December 2023, Media24 reported that News24 carried 76 journalists and had 85 185 digital subscribers in September 2023.^[1]

Its position inside the group has changed as the group's print titles have closed. Media24 ended the print editions of Beeld, Rapport, Daily Sun and Volksblad in 2024, moving the Afrikaans mastheads' content to Netwerk24 and Daily Sun to digital only; City Press has been digital-only since December 2024, and on 27 February 2026 Media24 began formal staff consultations with, in the chief executive's words, “the intention of closing this newsroom”.^[5]

What does News24 Sport cover?

Sport sits as one section of a general news site rather than as a standalone sports title, and Media24's own description of News24's scope places sport alongside politics, lifestyle and multimedia.^[2] The practical consequence is that the section covers the sports that carry general news interest in South Africa — the national rugby, cricket and football teams and the domestic professional competitions — rather than a specialist schedule.

Because Media24's own newspaper sport desks have been closing or moving, the group's sports journalism has concentrated on digital surfaces. The 2024 closures of the Beeld, Rapport, Daily Sun and Volksblad print editions, and the 2026 consultation over City Press, removed or reduced print sports pages that had previously run in parallel with the site.^[5] Media24's submission to the Competition Commission described print advertising revenue in its news division as “declining dramatically from 2018 to 2023” and noted that “reader revenue for digital content and products is considerably less than what we used to generate from printed media”.^[1]

How large is News24's audience?

The firmest dated figures are the ones Media24 filed with a regulator. Its submission to the Competition Commission gives News24 817 709 daily active users and 85 185 digital subscribers in September 2023, the subscriber number a 35 per cent increase year on year, and notes that the group reports daily average users rather than page views or unique browsers as its primary traffic measure.^[1]

Media24's advertising material carries larger and undated claims for the same title, including more than 110 000 subscribers, 7.3 million monthly users, 27 million monthly visits and 144 million monthly page views; the page also carries a figure of 1.5 million monthly page views alongside them, so the set is internally inconsistent and none of it is attributed to a measurement body or a period.^[2] These are the publisher's claims about itself.

The industry currency is Narratiive, described by the Publisher Research Council as the official online audience measurement currency contracted to IAB South Africa, reporting monthly across about 200 South African sites.^[4] The most recent month published on the Council's report page is April 2022, when News24 recorded 84 669 084 page views and 10 759 363 unique browsers; a January 2022 reading gives 106.2 million page views and 12.9 million unique browsers.^[4] No currency-measured figure for News24 later than April 2022 could be retrieved, and no figure isolating the sport section from the rest of the site could be retrieved at all.

Since when has News24 existed?

No founding date for News24 could be retrieved from a source obtained for this page. Media24's corporate description of the title carries no launch year, and its advertising material carries none either.^[3][2] The claim is therefore left unmade rather than taken from an unverified source.

What can be dated is the title's measured existence and its scale at particular moments. Narratiive readings published through the Publisher Research Council place News24 among the largest South African sites through 2021 and 2022, with the April 2022 reading at 10 759 363 unique browsers.^[4] Media24's regulatory filing places it at 817 709 daily active users and 85 185 subscribers in September 2023.^[1]

The group around it is younger in its present shape than the title. The transition to a digital-first publisher is dated by the closures: print editions ended in 2024 for four mastheads, City Press became digital-only in December 2024, and the City Press newsroom consultation opened on 27 February 2026.^[5] Those are closures and transitions, not the founding of News24, and the two should not be run together.

Why does News24 Sport matter in South Africa's sport?

It matters because of the scale of the surface the sport section sits on and because of what has closed around it. The Audit Bureau of Circulations of South Africa, a non-profit company whose function is “the certification and provision of accurate and comparable circulation figures”, certifies print circulation for members; its figures for the fourth quarter of 2023 record a 7.4 per cent year-on-year decline in the collective circulation of all members and a fall in membership from 448 publications in 2022 to 403.^[6][7] Daily Sun, a Media24 title, fell 55 per cent year on year to 12 616 copies in that quarter.^[7]

As print sports pages have contracted, subscription-funded digital reporting has become the form in which much South African sports journalism is now paid for. Media24's filing sets out the difficulty plainly: technology costs for digital-only brands “more than doubled between 2018 and the financial year to 30 March 2023” and “are not nearly recouped by the revenue levels generated through subscriptions and advertising”.^[1]

For a reader looking for South African sports coverage that is not tied to a rights holder, a general news site with a paying subscriber base and a reported 76-journalist newsroom is a different kind of source from a broadcaster reporting on competitions it has bought.^[1] That editorial independence from rights ownership is the section's structural role rather than a judgement about its quality.