How 7,300 stories reached 110 million readers in 2025

Mongabay published more than 7,300 environmental stories across eight languages this year. By the numbers alone, that's a newsroom that has grown — geographically, editorially, and in reach. By year's end, the organization expects its reporting to land with 110 million unique readers, a 44% jump from 2024.

But here's the thing about those numbers: they're incomplete. They count website visits only. They don't capture the stories shared on WhatsApp, republished by more than 100 partner outlets worldwide, or embedded in policy briefings and courtroom arguments. Reach and impact are different animals.

What people actually read

The most-clicked stories this year tell you something about what moves readers — and it's messier than you might expect. Some pieces rode news cycles or moments when the world suddenly paid attention. Others benefited from the strange alchemy of social media, where novelty and surprise move faster than nuance. A few were deliberately light. Others, like obituaries and deeply reported investigations, carried a weight that traffic metrics can't measure.

That unevenness matters because Mongabay's real benchmark isn't virality. It's whether a story shifts something: whether it informed a policy debate, supported a legal case, changed a mind that could change a decision. The organization tracks those outcomes separately — not as an afterthought, but as the actual measure of work.

The expansion reflected in those 7,300 stories speaks to something worth noticing. Detailed, evidence-based reporting on environmental issues — the kind that requires time, expertise, and often difficult reporting in remote or contested places — still finds an audience. It does this even as attention fragments, even as news competes with everything else for space in your brain.

That's not guaranteed. It's a choice, made by readers, again and again.