Last month The Independent also featured among the ten fastest-growing sites in the top 50, as it seeks to grow its US foothold. The New York Times remained the biggest newsbrand in the US by number of visits, followed by CNN, MSN, Fox News and Yahoo Finance (150.1 million visits) which knocked People out of fifth position. Long-running magazine The Atlantic also saw a strong March with 30 million visits, an increase of 26% month-on-month. Along with USA Today (143.4 million visits, up 13% year-on-year) and New York Times (498.6 million, up 10%), it was one of three of the top ten websites by number of visits in March to see double-digit growth.
The most notable result of the change appears to be that it has bounced CNN (525 million visits) ahead of The New York Times (385.7 million) to retake the top spot on the traffic ranking. Year-on-year, however, the fastest growth was at sports publisher Athlon Sports, which has been the case among the US top 50 every month since May. Further down the rankings The Daily Beast was the highest debuting publication, entering the top 50 at 39th place after seeing traffic rise 22% month-on-month to 30 million. Mail Online remained steady at ninth place with 122.2 million visits while Google News (120.8 million) jumped three places to tenth despite losing 4% of traffic month-on-month, displacing Newsweek (115.7 million) from the top ten. But in August People.com (162.6 million visits) and Yahoo Finance (162.8 million) were the only top ten sites to continue growing their traffic, by 3% and 2% respectively.
NBC News, similarly, grew its traffic 112.5% compared with last year, while USA Today managed growth of 65.5%. The biggest fallers compared with December 2023 among the whole top 50 were UK tabloid The Sun (23 million, down 55%), The Los Angeles Times (19.4 million, down 33.2%) and Huffpost (43.6 million, down 21%). Among the nine websites to lose traffic month-on-month, five saw decreases of 2.1% or lower.
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Google News, The New York Times and Yahoo Finance all saw a 9% month-on-month rise in visits, while People, Fox News and USA Today rose 5%. Month-on-month, however, all but one of the top ten saw traffic rise in March compared with February. Among the ten most-visited news sites in the US, the AP was followed by People magazine (158.3 million, up 14%) for year-on-year growth, then by aggregator Google News (121.1 million, up 9%) and The New York Times (492.5 million, up 6%). The Atlantic saw a jump of more than 40% month on month amid its blockbuster story published on 24 March revealing its editor had been accidentally added to a Trump administration group chat about military strikes in Yemen. Press Gazette’s top-50 ranking of US news shows the New York Times hold its lead versus CNN in top spot with 479.3 million visits in the month.
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The Daily Mail remained the best-ranked British newsbrand in the ranking (119.8 million visits) although it dropped one place to eleventh from tenth in the past month. The Independent was one of the fastest-growing news sites in the US in January, according to Press Gazette’s latest ranking. The New York Times (456.7 million visits) remained the biggest newsbrand in the US by number of visits, followed by CNN (372.8 million), MSN, Fox News and People. At the other end of the list however, Microsoft news aggregator MSN (247.4 million visits) and News Corp’s New York Post (124.9 million) saw the biggest year-on-year slumps at 17% each. People (up 30% year-on-year), USA Today (up 20%) and Yahoo Finance (up 14%) saw the biggest increases in visits compared to February 2023.
Climate news site The Cooldown saw the second most year-on-year growth, with visits rising 152% to 21.9 million. The fastest year-on-year growth came at Athlon Sports, which attracted 28.5 million visits in https://www.emsc.eu/about_us/who_we_are/ June, up 484% from the prior year. In addition Newsweek saw visits rise 144% compared to June the prior year, but it did not see the most year-on-year growth among the top 50. ABC News (83.5 million visits) saw the most growth between June and July, increasing traffic 81%. The largest gains month-on month were at political and hard news sites, again reflecting a historic July for news.
- A third of the top 50 lost traffic year-over-year, with the largest decline seen at the US version of the UK’s un-paywalled Sun tabloid (23 million, down 63.8% year-over-year).
- Business Insider (56.8 million) and Huffpost (43.7 million) each received 25% less traffic this January than January last year.
- In September, the news division saw a spike as it increased 54% month on month (the biggest leap compared to August in the whole top 50 ranking) and 5% year on year to 96.6 million.
- Mail Online, known as DailyMail.com in the US, also saw a steep traffic drop in May falling 32% year on year to 86.9 million visits per month in the US.
The Los Angeles Times (23.7 million visits) and Washington Post (102.4 million) saw the sixth and eighth largest drops, falling by 7.9% and 6.6% respectively compared with October. Among the top ten most-visited sites specifically, all but two sites saw some year-on-year growth. The biggest traffic pullback in the top ten was at USA Today (143.6 million, down 29.4%), followed by CNN (356.6 million, down 22.5%) and Fox News (253.6 million, down 17%). Some 32 sites grew their total number of website visits year on year, according to Similarweb. Business Insider (56.8 million) and Huffpost (43.7 million) each received 25% less traffic this January than January last year. CNN (399.1 million, up 12%) and USA Today (158.6 million, up 10.4%) increased their visits by double-digit percentage points, while the New York Post (127.9 million, down 10%) the only top-ten site to lose traffic.