In 2025, Mongabay recorded 111 million unique visitors to its websites, a 46% increase on the year before. Pageviews rose by 72%. Those figures capture direct readership only. They exclude circulation through newsletters, messaging apps and social platforms, as well as republication by more than 100 partner outlets. Yet volume is not the metric we care about most. For our purposes, scale is most meaningful when considered alongside use and influence.

Mongabay is not built primarily to maximize general-audience traffic. Pageviews indicate that a page was opened, but on their own they reveal little about whether it informed a decision or changed a course of action. The question I return to is simple: who used the reporting, and for what purpose? Mongabay’s theory of change rests on a different premise: journalism matters when it shapes decisions. What matters most is who reads a story and whether they are in a position to act. Much of our journalism is designed for practitioners, policymakers, researchers, advocates, journalists, and others whose choices shape environmental outcomes. This focus reflects how environmental governance typically operates—through interconnected networks of public agencies, companies, investors, media, non-profit and civil-society groups, researchers, conservation practitioners, courts, and community organizations. The most consequential reader is rarely the most casual one.

The geographic distribution of our audience hints at how this works in practice. Asia and the Americas each accounted for more than 46 million unique visitors. In absolute terms, those regions dominate. In per capita terms, the story differs, and that difference is instructive.

Consider Singapore, which appears near the top of our per-capita readership. Singapore is small and densely connected to the region’s economy. It is also a nexus for information and finance related to Southeast Asia’s forests and seas, commodities and conservation. It sits downwind of Indonesian peatlands and forests that burn during dry years, sending haze across borders. That makes Indonesian land-use decisions feel less remote. Over time we have built deep reporting in Indonesia, including on palm oil, mining, conservation enforcement and community land rights. For readers in Singapore, those topics are not abstract. They intersect with public health, corporate reputations, regulatory risk and regional diplomacy. When we publish stories grounded in Indonesian realities, the relevance travels easily across the strait.

Indonesia itself is another reason Asia’s totals are relatively large. Our network there is extensive, and the country’s environmental stakes are unusually high. Forests, peatlands, fisheries, and wildlife are central to national development debates, local livelihoods and international trade. The same logic helps explain strong readership in India and Bangladesh. Air pollution, coastal vulnerability, water stress and land-use conflict are felt as daily constraints, rather than distant possibilities. Publishing in multiple languages, including Indonesian, Hindi and Bengali, increases access for readers who already have reasons to pay attention.

Asia’s population is enormous, so even tens of millions of readers translate into modest per-capita reach. Coverage across such a large region is necessarily uneven. But the scale matters because so much of the world’s land-use change and industrial growth is concentrated there. A specialized newsroom reaching large numbers of readers in Asia, even unevenly, suggests that environmental reporting can still find traction when it is locally relevant and usable.

The Americas show a different pattern. With under one billion people across North and South America, a readership of more than 46 million implies higher per-capita reach. Here, too, content and context align. Many of the countries that appear prominently in our traffic are also places where forests, oceans and wildlife are central to politics and livelihoods. Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia are jurisdictions where land tenure, Indigenous rights, illegal mining, cattle expansion, protected areas, and climate finance intersect. In such settings, reporting is often used as a working document: cited by advocates, reviewed by officials, reused by other journalists, or incorporated into research and legal efforts that shape subsequent decisions.

Europe contributed just over 8.4 million unique visitors. Africa recorded about 4.7 million. Oceania, at 2.6 million, had the smallest absolute audience but the highest per-capita reach, with roughly one in seventeen residents accessing our reporting directly during the year. Australia accounts for much of that, and the reasons are clear. Australians live in a country where biodiversity loss is visible, where reef decline is debated nationally, and where land-use politics are tightly linked to climate and water. Even for a specialist outlet, there is a receptive audience when the environmental story is also a domestic one.

These figures do not include social media activity. They also do not capture what happens when stories travel through republication or are cited in briefings and policy documents. For a nonprofit that makes reporting free to reuse, that secondary circulation is part of the point. Analytics can miss the most important form of distribution: private circulation among decision-makers, such as links shared within working groups, meeting agendas or legal filings.

Authorship helps explain why this audience looks the way it does. Although Mongabay is incorporated in the United States, our journalism is produced far from a single center. In 2024 and 2025, we published work from 1,139 distinct bylines, excluding commentaries. Of these, 121 belonged to staff journalists and editors, while 1,018 were contributors. Staff operate in more than 30 countries; contributors in nearly 90. Asia accounts for the largest share of bylines, followed by North and Central America, South America and Africa.

At the national level, India led with 228 authors, followed by the United States, Indonesia, Brazil and Colombia. More than 80% of our stories were authored by journalists based in Global South countries. In 2025 alone, we published more than 7,300 stories across eight languages. The largest volumes came from Indonesia, Spanish-language Latin America and the global English desk.

This structure reflects a deliberate model we often describe as “grassroots to global”. Reporters embedded in specific regions cover village-level disputes over land tenure, fisheries enforcement or mining permits. Editors then connect those accounts to broader patterns in commodity markets, climate finance or international law. The aim is to avoid parachute reporting and to give local journalists primary authorship over stories that concern their own communities.

Impact, in this framework, is more important to track than traffic. We maintain an internal system that combines quantitative indicators with qualitative follow-up. Analytics tell us where audiences are located and how they engage. But we also document downstream outcomes: policy shifts, enforcement actions, new protected areas, corporate decisions, legal proceedings, and the cancellation or redesign of harmful projects. This approach reflects the view that journalism’s value lies in what happens after publication.

Impact

The distinction between reach and consequence is practical as well as conceptual. A Mongabay investigation into large-scale forest clearing in Peru drew a large audience and widespread republication. More consequentially, it contributed to permits being revoked and to a company being delisted from the London Stock Exchange. In Gabon, reporting on the Massaha community’s campaign against a logging concession preceded the revocation of a company’s permit and official protection of a forest at the community’s request. These outcomes resulted from the actions of officials, courts and civil-society groups as well as the availability of documented evidence. Our role was to document facts credibly, with names, evidence and context, at moments when they could be used.

The arrival of generative artificial intelligence has introduced another variable. Referrals from platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini rose sharply in 2025. Readers arriving through these tools tend to spend substantially longer on articles than those coming from social feeds. This pattern should be interpreted cautiously, but it may signal a shift in how audiences evaluate information. When fluent summaries are ubiquitous, provenance matters more. Some readers appear to check the underlying reporting and identify who is accountable for the claims.

I sometimes describe Mongabay as a form of civic infrastructure for environmental information. That framing risks sounding grand. The organization remains small relative to global media giants, and the problems we cover are larger than any newsroom. Still, the idea captures what we try to do. We prioritize influence over impressions. We publish from the Global South because that is where many of the world’s most consequential environmental decisions and impacts are concentrated. The real test lies beyond the dashboard: whether the information we place in public view helps others make decisions that protect ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.

Credits

Rhett Butler Editor

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