The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s April “Australian tour” is going to become one of those moments with a larger impact for months and possibly years to come. We watched it play out in real time, as the British media and right-wing Australian press desperately tried to sabotage the tour, only to see their lies and false narratives blow up in their faces once Harry and Meghan touched down in Oz. Two national press cartels tripped over their d–ks in front of the world and it was amazing. The Oz tour was so successful, people are STILL complaining about it and trying to create postmortem “reasons” why the tour was bad, bad, bad. Meanwhile, it absolutely looks like the same Oz tour was the inspiration for the Princess of Wales to get off her ass and travel to Italy, which also has far-reaching implications for the Sussexes’ impact on the left-behinds.
Anyway, here’s another piece of retrofitted, reverse-engineered propaganda for “why the Sussexes’ tour was bad.” Newsweek’s royal guy argues that the Australian tour didn’t accomplish what Meghan wanted because… something something As Ever’s traffic!!
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s four-day tour of Australia aimed to warm the country to their version of royalty, but just weeks later, Newsweek can reveal signs the publicity appears to have had the opposite effect.
Data collected by Newsweek using the digital intelligence platform Similarweb show that website traffic for Meghan’s lifestyle brand, As Ever, dropped both globally and in Australia in April, the same month they embarked on a tour of Sydney and Melbourne.
That is significant because one potential benefit of the visit was an opportunity to promote the couple ahead of As Ever’s global expansion, which Meghan has said is coming down the track.
Meghan sells jams, honey, candles, wine, and other products through her As Ever online shop and currently ships only to the United States, but going global could significantly expand her audience.Data from SimilarWeb, accessed by Newsweek, appears to indicate why Meghan wants to go global: Americans made up just 35 percent of her traffic in April, meaning the other 65 percent of visitors would likely have left empty-handed unless they had an American friend to purchase for them.
Other visitors come primarily from Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia despite the fact that she does not currently ship there. Had Meghan’s Australia visit caused a surge in audience on her As Ever website, that would have set out a clear business case for launching Down Under.
The fact that her Australian audience was down at the exact moment she was on the ground, smiling and shaking hands with Aussies in Melbourne and Sydney, poses questions about whether the news coverage generated by the trip will actually translate into sales once her store launches.
Meghan’s website had 178,143 total visitors in April, a 20 percent drop from March, when she had 226,330 visits. The Australian share also dipped from 6.42 percent to 6.28 percent. That works out at around 11,200 Australian visits in April compared to around 14,500 the month before. Both months, though, were down on February when Australians made up 9.04 percent of 213,030 total visits, giving her around 19,300 Australian visits. Meghan and Harry’s spokesperson announced the tour in early March, meaning Aussie visits to As Ever dipped during both the March build-up and the April tour.
From February, before the tour was announced, to April, when it took place, there was a 42 percent slump in her Australian audience from around 19,300 visits to 11,200. The curve, in other words, has been heading in the wrong direction for a duchess preparing to expand her business abroad, and the visit did nothing to turn the tide.
If you’d like a non-Deranger analysis of why these numbers are actually amazing, go here to Celeb Chai. Basically, it’s stunning for a start-up brand like As Ever, a brand which only ships domestically, to have this kind of international traffic. The argument that “Meghan was in Australia to promote As Ever” falls flat because she literally did nothing to promote As Ever! I actually wanted Meghan to host an As Ever pop-up shop or announce an As Ever expansion to Australia during the tour. She did not.
It’s also funny that Newsweek acts like “As Ever traffic” is the only marker of interest, when Meghan literally announced her investment and participation in OneOff during the tour, and I’m sure OneOff’s traffic and app-downloads skyrocketed that week. Speaking of, that’s another marker of success which is being studiously ignored by Newsweek: Meghan’s Midas Touch when it comes to fashion, where everything she wore in Australia sold out and all of the Aussie designers saw a huge spike in interest and sales.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
[galery]
These people will never cope with being left in the cold. Harry and Meghan are millionaires. They’re not struggling. Literally trying to manifest a reality that doesn’t exist. Aren’t they tired? LOL.
Jack must think we are daft. His big gotcha moment actually confirmed that Meghan is doing way above average in the luxury lifestyle DTC space. She is actually making millions a month even if a fraction of the 200,000 visitors a month buy her products.
In direct-to-consumer food and beverage, a Series A funding round typically requires fifty to one hundred thousand monthly visits combined with paid customer acquisition costs of forty to eighty dollars per customer.
As Ever was generating more than double the Series A benchmark with no paid acquisition spend, meaning the replacement value of the organic traffic funnel alone, if a competitor attempted to replicate it through Meta and Google advertising, would cost between eight and fifteen million dollars annually before a single product shipped.
The August 2025 rosé drop moved ten thousand bottles in ten minutes generating between four hundred and five hundred thousand dollars in revenue in a single six hundred second window, with twenty percent of buyers returning for larger orders. The July 2025 drop sold out in forty-five minutes at a sustained rate of one hundred and forty-eight to one hundred and seventy-eight bottles per minute. These are the numbers of a supply-constrained brand, not a struggling one.
When the revenue streams are stacked, the As Ever direct-to-consumer line alone generates an estimated eighteen to twenty-eight million dollars annually depending on drop activity, with affiliate commissions, brand partnerships, the Netflix deal amortised at sixteen to twenty million per year, and ancillary income bringing the total annual envelope to between forty-one and sixty-two million dollars.
The Australia tour in April 2026 generated fifty-one point six million dollars in Media Impact Value in four days, sold out the inventories of more than two dozen brands, drove one partner’s sales up by eight hundred percent week on week and surpassed one million outfit views on the OneOff platform in three days. Every outlet that published the two hundred and twenty thousand figure as a tombstone was simultaneously driving the organic traffic that made the number possible, so thank you Jack and your ilk! LOL
You have to applaude their imagination – how to turn every single factoid into something bad. At the same time, nobody listens to their arguments.
Looks to me like all of these ridiculous over the top hateful articles are to hold on to their (quickly dying) hateful fan base. These articles feels like a constant reassurance that “trust us! Harry, and especially Meghan, are failing miserably! Don’t believe what you see and have seen over the past 6 years! It’s all a mirage!”🤣
@truthsf. It does feel like the British press are trying to hang on to trolls because the hate isn’t selling. It’s not a coincidence several referenced that disgusting reddit page and some Twitter trolls. Getting trolls on their YouTube and Substack. How the mighty have fallen, lol. They are so bothered they can’t make money off the Sussexes anymore and they are living their lives. They’re jilted lovers.
Doesn’t surprise me that the shit on Meg is continuing weeks after the trip to OZ. All they have are made up lies to sell. Someone is very jealous of all the goodwill and success of the trip! We can’t have good things happening for Meg.
I was in the St Agni boutique in Melbourne after the visit and they were over the moon, completely sold out and in awe of how Meghan is so gorgeous, stylish and an incredible influencer (don’t like that word but she does influence people to follow her style).
So, interest spiked when she was on the ground in Australia, and then settled back to normal numbers once she left? Is that odd? It’s like music spiking when a biopic comes out for a musician, or interest in earlier films once an actor wins an Oscar.
I sincerely don’t understand the point of this article. They’re measuring website traffic as an indication of what? How many people are buying product? How can you possibly translate this? 100,000 people from the US came to the website, but we don’t have any actual metrics because it’s a private business so we don’t know how many of those people bought items?
60% of the traffic is from outside of the US, and even though you can utilize shipping companies to forward it on to you, none of those people have bought product? Which we don’t know because we have no numbers from the company.
I really don’t understand the point of this article. Other than, somehow this is a bad indicator for her business? To me this is like someone telling me that I don’t make enough to pay for my house, when they don’t know where I work, they don’t know my salary, and they don’t know how much my mortgage is. No details, but all they know is that it’s not sufficient
I don’t understand where they get the numbers, in the first place
The point is to try and make it seem like Meghan is failing and flailing. They’re trying to prove their own narrative. It’s a false narrative, but they are trying.
Perhaps traffic on the site was down a bit because her fans were watching pictures from the tour rather than pictures from the store. I have looked at the site occasionally, from curiosity.
As Ever is achieving those monthly numbers without any real marketing budget. Businesses pay a fortune to have Google etc to drive traffic to their websites and Royston thinks monthly visits in the high 100,000 is a failure? The guy’s as thick as mince.
Meghan should sell mince pie.
Or chutney.
How do people get these numbers, anyway? It’s a little disturbing to know that someone can measure /quantify the traffic to someone else’s website.
My question as well.
There are a number of trackers available. I use semrush.
Fascinating and yes, slightly disturbing that these numbers are available, but thank you for your analysis above. Have to admit it will take me some time to fully understand what you’re saying there, but I can certainly understand “10,000 bottles in 10 minutes“, and all I can say to that is wow!
What we doing here? Meghan only ships to the US. For some reason the British press got it their heads that Meghan was going to Australia to promote AsEver when that was never the case. If anything, Meghan should be pleased with the traffic the website gets from overseas markets.
Another emotional support article by Royston to make KP feel better.
Exactly. If the byline says jack royston you know the article is garbage.
Meghan is achieving phenomenal success. She ships direct to consumers without having to pay a middle man. The kind of traffic her website draws along is astonishing. She has to be very pleased with her accomplishment this far and this is a new company. As a customer, I am very proud of accomplishments
Exactly! And she’s never had to pay a fortune to generate that amount of organic traffic to her website.
A very obvious reason for a decline would be lack of new products or restocks. I wander by the site a few times a month just to make sure I haven’t missed anything and restock my jam. My 16YO son knows what As Ever boxes look like and gets thrilled to get our monthly jam. We need apricot spread, though.
Agreed! We’re about in Apricot season (March-June), so let’s get that spread!!
I also go in periodically to see if there are any “surprises”, and also to reorder my Rosé when I’m down to 4 bottles lol (more is coming today, hooray!). Still have 3 bottles of the delicious Brut; saving for my housewarming for my condo Reno. I still might have to order more, just in case I feel like dipping into it because it is just *so* good!! And like the L’Oreal ad says: “I’m worth it!” lol
If I had to generate this drivel, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning.
“Ugh, another day of writing deranged crap to please my deranged Kate fans who hate Meghan.”)