Top 25 U-S News Websites During August

Two-thirds of the top news sites in the US saw traffic shrink month-on-month in August following a bumper July, according to the Press-Gazette.

But the picture is rosier over a longer timespan, with three-quarters of the top 50 publishers seeing year-on-year growth in visits in August.

The contraction is particularly pronounced among the top ten US news sites by traffic, where eight publishers saw visits drop compared to July.

In July every site in the top ten saw month-on-month traffic growth, likely driven by blockbuster news events including the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s departure from the presidential race.

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.

The biggest drop came at CNN, which saw visits fall 16% to 441.4 million. It nonetheless remained the most-visited news site in the US, a position it has held since Similarweb updated its data model in June and pushed the site ahead of The New York Times.

Top 25 news websites in the US

The New York Times maintained its position in second place, with 361.8 million visits, and Fox News was third on 293 million.

Yahoo Finance and People both shuffled up the board one spot to sixth and seventh place respectively, pushing the New York Post (150 million visits, down 7% year-on-year) down to eighth.

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.