Just days before April Fools' Day, but in the Las Palmas media ecosystem, the joke has been circulating all year. It's due to the miracle of the Canarian media outlets based in Alcobendas. While newspaper vendors are disappearing from traffic lights and practically the entire south of Gran Canaria, the kiosks on Triana Street or in El Tablero de Maspalomas languish, guarding the best-kept secret of the Islands—the paper sales figures, which once filled pages and TV ads—local newspapers have embraced a new religion: the digital audience, a gaseous entity that allows not everyone to be a leader at the same time, provided the right graphic is chosen.
It's fascinating to observe how publishing groups have applied the "Stalinist erasure" to print circulation figures. While they boast of 13 million sessions in a quarter, no one seems to remember how many physical copies are actually sold at newsstands in San Telmo or supermarkets in San Fernando de Maspalomas. Paper has become like that distant relative at weddings: everyone knows it exists, but no one invites it into the group selfie.
Celebrating unique users who may have only clicked on a Teide weather forecast is like measuring a restaurant's success by the number of people glancing at the menu outside. In Las Palmas, information travels fast, but primarily from mainland servers to the mobile devices of users who, according to statistics, are legion. If GfK DAM's figures continue to grow at this rate, by FITUR 2026 there will be more unique users on Canary Island newspapers than there are inhabitants in the entire Mid-Atlantic.
The latest GfK DAM panel from November 2025 has sparked euphoria in Las Palmas with impressive, almost mystical, unique user figures, indicating that practically every Canary Islander with a thumb and a smartphone has visited their website. However, the sheer volume of numbers is worthy of a drag queen performance from Maspalomas. In this ranking, if you partner with a national newspaper like El Español, the numbers multiply magically thanks to SEO, reaching nearly a million unique users during peak months.
The most endearing aspect of this numbers game is the concept of "Canarian media." At this point in 2025, 90% of these "digital natives" have their heart (that is, their servers) beating in data centers in Madrid, Valencia, or Barcelona. It's a delightful paradox: we consume "local" information served from the mainland. Reading news about wildfires or the Red Sea crisis through a server in Alcobendas gives it that touch of "near-distance" so characteristic of our island. Talking about "digital island press" while the bits travel through the submarine cable 200 milliseconds away is, at the very least, an act of faith worthy of an early April Fool's joke.
