But the pursuit of clicks can have more damaging effects, too.
After the Daily Mirror last month released a video on social media claiming the Met Office had urged people to shut their curtains at 4:30pm amid heavy rainfall, the forecaster published a caustic response branding the reporting “utter nonsense”, adding: “There is so much wrong with this video it’s hard to believe it’s only 44 seconds long.”
Reliance on Facebook
Behind this strategy is a frantic effort to wean Reach publications, which includes local titles such as the Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo, as well as OK! Magazine, off its unhealthy reliance on Facebook.
The social media giant’s recent overhaul of its algorithm deprioritised news articles with a devastating effect on the newsgroup, which had long relied on Facebook for referrals.
In an email earlier this month, Graeme Brown, the editor of Birmingham Live, wrote: “Page views are our currency and there was a time we were getting 50pc of our traffic from Facebook – now it is more like 5pc.”
But by doubling down on page views, Reach risks falling into the same trap again.
Google has already made a number of changes to its algorithm over the last year aimed at tackling “spam and low-quality content”.
As a result, this has pushed news outlets down the search rankings – particularly those with a heavy reliance on ads.
Alex DeGroote, a media analyst, said: “You’ve basically swapped one news feed for another.” He also warned that Google could easily follow Facebook in abandoning news.
“Ultimately these algorithm-driven digital media companies don’t answer to anybody, let alone domestic publishers,” he adds.
For its part, Reach is looking to increase reader registrations to extract data, which will then help improve its own advertising and e-commerce propositions. But its business is still fundamentally reliant on clicks and the unpredictable vagaries of the social media engines that underpin them.
This strategy has already claimed a number of victims – not least among them a noisy cohort of youth-focused digital media ventures.
Earlier this year, The Independent snapped up the BuzzFeed and HuffPost brands in the UK after both companies shut down their news operations. Vice, once the poster child of scrappy digital media, laid off hundreds of employees and stopped publishing on its website in February.
Another tactic pursued by Jim Mullen, the Reach chief executive, has been US expansion, with the Mirror and Express both launching websites across the Atlantic. But there are growing doubts about whether this strategy will succeed in propping up the publisher’s page views.
Rivals MailOnline and The Sun, which are also reliant on digital advertising revenues, have both begun cutting jobs in their US operations as they struggle to gain traction.
Richard Ellis, a veteran newspaper executive who has overseen cost-cutting at a number of publications including The Telegraph, recently took up the role of US managing director for MailOnline.
Underlying trend of decline
There are signs the outlook may be improving. Reach’s online business returned to growth in the third quarter, with digital revenues rising 2.5pc as higher ad earnings offset a 5pc decline in page views. The improved figures largely reflected a boost from the Euros as brands brought forward their spending to June and July.
Reach has shrunk considerably over the last five years. Revenues stood at £569m last year, a decline of more than a fifth from £723m in 2018. It is now valued at £300m on the London Stock Exchange, down from its £2bn peak in 2005.