Advertiser response In February 2021, four months before the station began broadcasting, the pressure group
Stop Funding Hate called for advertisers to boycott the station, based on what they thought it would represent. In June 2021, following the station's launch, several brands including
Vodafone,
IKEA,
Kopparbergs Brewery,
Grolsch,
Nivea,
Pinterest,
Specsavers and
Octopus Energy paused their advertising on the channel, expressing concerns over its content. Some of these advertisements had been placed on the brands' behalf without their knowledge, by
Sky Media through their advertising
opt-outs during GB News's schedule. The
Culture Secretary,
Oliver Dowden, criticised Stop Funding Hate and what he described as "a vocal Twitter minority" for calling for the advertising boycott. In November 2023, in response to an advertiser boycott, GB News introduced an online paywall with three membership tiers. The channel, known for its outspoken approach, chose to seek new revenue streams following substantial financial losses in its first year and ongoing controversies, including breaches of impartiality rules and run-ins with the broadcasting regulator Ofcom.
Ratings and public response Critical response The channel launched to a mixed reception. Judith Woods, writing for
The Telegraph two days after the channel's launch, described it as "unutterably awful; boring, repetitive and cheapskate", rating it one out of five stars. Chris Bennion of
The Telegraph rated it four out of five stars, writing, "On launch night, the GB News message came through loud and clear – despite glitches." Jemima Kelly wrote for the
Financial Times, "GB News is so tedious, so lacking in nuance, so whiny and frankly so low-quality, it is actually making me more sympathetic to the cause of those they deem 'woke'." GB News became the subject of ridicule upon its launch due to the perceived poor production quality of the channel and frequent technical issues. The channel also became subject to a number of pranks, including
prank calls and
gag names, and had gained the nickname "GBeebies", a
pun on the children's channel
CBeebies. In August 2021, seven weeks after GB News' launch, Ian Burrell wrote in the
Evening Standard: "This channel has been both lampooned and ignored, but critics need to get used to something: GB News isn't going away." In a 2023 poll by
YouGov 12% of respondents ranked GB News as a trusted news-brand, compared to the BBC's 44%. Similarly, in the 2025
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism survey, 44% of respondents said they do not trust GB News, while 29% said they do. GB News' net trust of -15 was below that of ITV News (+37), BBC News (at +36), Channel 4 News (+30) and Sky News (+24), and it was the only broadcaster with negative net trust. According to an annual poll of 45,000 UK consumers by the market research company
Savanta, in 2022 GB News was the nation's third 'most loved' news brand, behind
The Guardian and
Metro. In the May 2023 survey, it was ranked as the UK's most-loved news brand, ahead of
The Guardian and
The Sun. Savanta claimed that the channel's high ranking was only a result of its
"Marmite" appeal, whereby its dedicated viewers are obsessively positive about the channel. Savanta explained that GB News "taps into a certain demographic's belief that mainstream media cannot be trusted".
Audience share In the 2025
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism survey, the share of respondents who said they watch GB News every week was 9%, behind
BBC News (at 47%),
ITV News (22%) and
Sky News (15%), but ahead of
Channel 4 News (8%) and
Channel 5 (3%). Viewers are equally likely to identify as middle class and working class as the general population. 58% of GB News viewers own their own home, while 33% rent. Among homeowners, 26% have a mortgage, 55% have already paid off their mortgage, and 19% did not have one to begin with. 51% voted
Conservative in the
2019 election, 22%
Labour, 5%
Liberal Democrat, and 12% did not vote. In the
2016 EU referendum, 63% voted to leave, 26% to remain, and 11% did not vote. In the coming
2024 election, 38% intended to vote
Reform, 25% Conservative, and only 17% Labour (fewer than had in 2019). However, viewership fell following the launch of the channel. A month after its launch, its daily viewership of just over 1 million trailed
Sky News' 2.5 to 3 million viewers. Audience figures subsequently fell further, and on 14 July, audience figures dropped so low they were reported as zero by the ratings measurement board
BARB at least twice on the day, attributed to regular viewers boycotting the station after one of its presenters,
Guto Harri,
took a knee on-air in solidarity with the England football team. GB News suspended the presenter, describing the event as an "unacceptable breach of our standards"; Harri later confirmed that he had permanently left the channel. The first episode of Nigel Farage's show on 19 July attracted an average audience of 100,000.
The Daily Telegraph reported that, in October 2021, "Nigel Farage remained the station's biggest draw, hauling in between 50,000 and 80,000 viewers while most of the channel's output remains firmly below 30,000." A
Daily Telegraph report in December 2021 stated that Farage's nightly programme regularly gets around 150,000 viewers. In February 2022, the
Press Gazette published an article including statistics on the audience and social following for GB News compared with other channels. The article noted that GB News' four-week audience reach was slightly up in early January to 2.2 million, compared to a low point in November 2021. In May 2022, figures published by
Radio Joint Audience Research Limited (RAJAR) showed GB News Radio had received an average audience of 239,000 listeners in its first three months of broadcasting. RAJAR figures for the second quarter of 2022 showed the channel's listenership grew by a further 16%, to 277,000 listeners, making it the second-fastest-growing radio channel in the UK (behind the
BBC World Service). Subsequently, between July and September 2022, GB News Radio's weekly audience grew by 50%, to 415,000; it was reported to be the only news radio channel to increase its audience during this period. In December 2022,
Press Gazette reported that GB News had beaten Sky News in primetime ratings over a 30-day period, with 57,107 viewers to Sky's 52,230. The channel remained behind Sky News for all-day viewership, but recorded a 48% increase in primetime viewers relative to the same period in 2021. The article also quoted a Christmas memo sent to staff by Frangopoulos, who said that 'In just 18 months you have worked as a team to end Sky News' undisputed 33-year reign as the most-watched commercial news channel in the United Kingdom'. Frangopoulos added that BARB figures showed the channel's fastest growing areas were in
Red Wall regions across the north-east (+17% in Q4 so far), the north-west (+14%), and Yorkshire (+12%)'. By November 2024, GB News had overtaken Sky News for its live TV viewers averaged over a 20-hour period between 6 am and 2 am for one month. Growing further by July 2025, the average audience for GB News was 80,600, slightly higher than that of the BBC News channel and Sky News. This led editorial director Mick Booker to claim the channel was on course to be the UK's largest news channel. However, in the same month, its weekly reach (the share of all viewers in an average week) was half that of BBC News and Sky News. High average viewership is a result of a smaller number of viewers watching GB News for longer periods. GB News' monthly share for July was 5.8%, compared to 13.2% for the BBC News channel and 11.5% for Sky News. These figures do not include viewers on BBC One, which accounts for the large majority of the BBC News viewership. By January 2026, the average ratings and total audience share for GB News had been the highest of any news channel in Britain for six consecutive months, to which the channel introduced new branding dubbing itself as "Britain's Number One". The channel saw an average audience of 87,700 in December 2025, compared to 74,500 on the BBC News channel and 58,300 on Sky News. However, according to
Press Gazette, its digital reach (5,400,000) still trailed that of BBC News (40,900,000) and Sky News (19,200,000), as did its total TV weekly reach. GB News has won several awards. Farage's nominations have proven controversial at the event, and was booed by some members of the audience during his acceptance speech at both the 2023 and 2024 ceremonies, where he won in his category of News Presenter. Eamonn Holmes was also reported to have been booed at the 2025 ceremony after paying tribute to the work of Charlie Peters – who won in the News Presenter category – for his work on the documentary ''Grooming Gangs: Britain's Shame
, although sources close to Holmes denied that the heckling took place in a statement to The Standard''.
Criticisms The
Board of Deputies of British Jews and the
All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism have criticised broadcasts on GB News for what they feel to be promoting "conspiratorial
antisemitism or other misinformation", particularly making note of some of Neil Oliver's broadcasts. GB News have been accused of "
demonising"
transgender people by figures such as broadcaster
India Willoughby.
PinkNews and
The Argus reported that social media users criticised an "alternative"
BBC Match of the Day programme, aired on the channel on 11 March 2023, as being
homophobic because it mocked Brighton and its
LGBTQ+ community. Alan Tyers of
The Daily Telegraph described the programme as an "orgy of inanity". Ofcom received 222 complaints about the segment, but decided not to investigate the incident. When reporting the
Gaza war a number of pro-
Hamas messages were read out on air by
Nana Akua.
Zoe Williams,
columnist on
The Guardian newspaper, has suggested that commercial success is of little relevance to the channel, with backers of the parent company prepared to cover its losses—£42m for the year ending in May 2023—and effectively make large donations to politicians for presenting programmes aligned with their views. A 2024 report by the Centre for Media Monitoring, a project of the Muslim Council of Britain, alleged that the channel was responsible for half of all British news broadcast coverage about Muslims over a two-year period, with much of the coverage being negative. A GB News spokesperson responded that the report was “inaccurate and defamatory". == Ofcom investigations ==