Big traffic loss for popular news websites
Traffic to the world’s 50 most popular news websites fell by 24% between January and February, according to British website Press Gazette’s analysis. Global visits to the top 50 English-language news sites combined fell to 6.6 billion in February, down from 8.7 billion the previous month, according to data from web analytics company SimilarWeb,
There was in November (the month of the US election) a peak of 9.4 billion but now the traffic is close to where it was prior to the pandemic. However, it´s still up 14% year-on-year, the website reports.
BBC.co.uk and BBC.com combined are still in top position with 1.2 billion website visits in February which is 16% lower than the previous month but up 23% year-on-year.
”A number of right-leaning and alternative sites saw both the biggest individual drops and gains globally in February.”
Pro-Trump US website Newsmax was the fastest growing site year-on-year with a 337% surge in clicks and views up from 8.5 million to 37.2 million. The Drudge Report, Breitbart News and Fox News were among the sites that shed the biggest proportion of their audiences compared to last February.
Conservative news aggregation site the Drudge Report saw its year-on-year visits fall by 41% from 71.4 million to 42.4 million, while visits to Fox News were down 22% to 261.9 million.
Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik was also among the sites that saw the biggest year-on-year drop in visits. Although the site made it into the top 50 for the first time since Press Gazette began publishing SimilarWeb rankings, entering in 38th place, monthly visits were down 34% from 73.9 million in February 2020 to 48.9 million.
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