A November analysis of traffic to the top 50 news websites in the USA, conducted by Similarweb for Press Gazette, shows a continuing trend of declining traffic. In total, 25 out of the 50 monitored websites saw a year-on-year decrease in visits of 20% or more.
The average year-on-year traffic decline across all 50 websites was 14%. This trend comes despite November being the month of the congressional elections, an event that usually boosts traffic to news sites.
The biggest drop, by 51%, affected The Washington Post's website, whose traffic reached 65.9 million visits in November 2024. Other established brands such as aol.com (down 42%) and aarp.org (down 40%) also experienced significant declines.
Conversely, Newsweek was able to buck the trend, being the only one in the top fifty to record double-digit growth, specifically by 15% to 27.6 million visits. CBS News' website also saw a slight growth of 2%.
The most visited news website in the USA remains, by a large margin, weather.com, which focuses on weather. In November, it attracted 488.7 million users. The second largest is Google News with 305.4 million visits, and the third is CNN with 271.8 million visits.