Top News Sites in the U-S in March: Substack Traffic Up

 The New York Times saw the biggest drop in US traffic among the top 50 websites in the country in March, according to Press Gazette’s latest monthly ranking.

The number of visits to nytimes.com fell 35% to 452.4 million – echoing both a similar fall in Press Gazette’s global top 50 ranking and the site’s 21% fall in February’s US ranking. 

The decline is potentially linked to declining interest in word game Wordle, which went viral early last year and quickly snapped up by the New York Times, and a widespread fall in year-on-year traffic comparisons following a surge in news interest about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The New York Times was also one of eight top ten sites by number of visits that saw a fall in traffic in March, according to data from digital intelligence platform Similarweb. 

The site with the second largest year-on-year fall in the top ten was Google News (146.9 million visits, down 25%) followed by washingtonpost.com (127.4 million visits, down 23%), cnn.com (446.2 million visits, also down 23%) and bbc.com and bbc.co.uk (141.7 million visits, down 21%).

CNBC was the fastest-growing top ten site (128.9 million visits, up 9% year-on-year).

Within the overall top 50, the fastest-growing site was newsletter platform Substack to which US visits were up 37% to 30.3 million. Second-fastest growing was cbsnews.com (52.8 million visits, up 32%) while the Sun’s US edition came in third (63.6 million, up 27%) continuing its run of rapid growth since launching across the Atlantic in 2020.

Despite its year-on-year audience fall, the New York Times remains the largest site by number of visits in the US top 50. It was followed by CNN, foxnews.com (305.6 million) and msn.com (297.8 million visits). Fox News rose one place up March’s ranking to displace MSN from third place.

Yahoo Finance (148.4 million visits, rank six), Google News (rank seven) and cnbc.com (rank ten) were the other sites at the top of the table to climb up the ranking in March. 

Top 15 News Sites during March '23

The Sun US edition saw the largest drop in places among the top 50, falling from rank 15 in February to rank 20 in March although it's year-on-year growth continued to be strong.