Fastest-growing month-on-month in the top 50 was Advance Local-owned New Jersey news site nj.com (23.5 million visits, up 33% month-on-month) while third fastest-growing was Business Insider (74.4 million, up 21%). It was followed for month-on-month growth in visits by progressive news website Rawstory (20.4 million, up 24%) and Newsweek (up 10% month-on-month). Month-on-month the fastest-growing newsbrand was The Cool Down (24.3 million visits, up 52% compared to January). The same two sites topped the table for monthly growth with visits to Athlon Sports up 126% and visits to Moneywise up 70% compared to April. It was followed by two News Corp titles, foxnews.com (269.1 million visits) and nypost.com (160.8 million), which were both up 8% month-on-month.
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- Among the top ten most-visited sites specifically, all but two sites saw some year-on-year growth.
- The California newspaper, which has seen traffic dip in recent months, recorded 42.3 million visitors last month, up 118% compared with December 2024 according to Similarweb.
- Among the nine websites to lose traffic month-on-month, five saw decreases of 2.1% or lower.
- Visits to bbc.com in the US were down 15% in July as the British public service broadcaster introduced a paywall to users in America.
Australian-based Science Alert saw the highest growth month on month, up 60% to 23.4 million visits. Seven of the top ten websites saw month-on-month growth, and People recorded the highest jump among these, up 14%, followed by MSN (up 8% to 148.7 million visits) and Yahoo Finance (up 4% to 133.2 million). Among the top ten US news sites, only celebrity news site People saw year-on-year growth in December, up 5% to 151.9 million visits. Visits to the Arena Group site were up 184% year on year and 130% month on month to 19.5 million in December, according to the latest Similarweb data. Men’s lifestyle magazine Men’s Journal recorded the highest year-on-year and month-on-month growth among the top 50 news websites in the US in December. Press Gazette’s monthly ranking of the top 50 news websites in the US, using Similarweb data.
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Business publisher Forbes (115.4 million, up 41.5%) saw the fastest rise, followed by People magazine (144.6 million, up 14.2%), The New York Times (up 8.9%) and the New York Post (142.1 million, up 8.1%). In terms of annual growth Athlon Sports and The Cooldown again topped the charts, with both seeing greater than 300% year-on-year growth. The New York Times extended its lead over CNN has the most popular news website in the US according to Press Gazette’s latest top-50 ranking. The US Sun has been affected by Google’s algorithm changes and reduced the size of its newsroom in September to target fewer key content areas. 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). Fox News (278.4 million, down 3.7%), aggregator MSN (214.3 million, down 8.2%) and the New York Post (127.9 million, down 8.7%) lost traffic, meanwhile.
While some say Facebook referral traffic has returned this year, others complain that the addition of AI-written summaries to Google search results has deeply impacted click-through rates to articles. Publishers have complained in recent years about falling referral traffic from Google and Facebook. The Times of Israel fell back out of the top 50 after its visits almost doubled in June to enter in 43rd place. Meanwhile the vast majority (44) saw fewer visits than they did a year earlier in July 2024. Some content remains free to all users regardless of whether they have hit the paywall, including select global breaking news stories. The BBC launched a dynamic paywall for users in the US at the end of June, charging $8.99 (£6.55) per month or $49.99 (£36.40) per year.
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 Visit Kulturbloggen 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.
The biggest year-on-year drop among the top ten was seen at Gannett’s USA Today, which shed 17% of its March 2024 traffic to attract 134.7 million visits last month. Three in five of the top 50 news websites in the US recorded year-on-year growth, with the biggest percentage increase seen at sports news site Athlon Sports. Rival title The Mirror, which is yet to feature in the top 50 US news websites, grew 631% year on year to 15.1 million visits in April 2025 according to Similarweb data. Substack rose to 19th position with growth of 42.5% year on year to 67.7 million visits in the US for its network of newsletter-driven websites. Only 15 out of the top 50 news websites in the US grew traffic year on year in May, according to the latest data from Similarweb. More than half (29) of the 50 biggest news websites in the US saw a month-on-month decline.