USA Today (128.8 million, down 19%) was the fastest faller among the group, followed by CNN (345.1 million, down 14%) and BBC News (112.3 million, down 11%). However they are also in spite of an eventful February for US news which included an airplane crash in Washington DC and an Oval Office row between Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Since November 2023 Similarweb has excluded the figures for edition.cnn.com in its report to Press Gazette since they are counted under the main domain. The smallest increases were seen at the AP (4%), MSN (3%) and CNN (2%), while the New York Post lost a negligible proportion of traffic. Fox News and Yahoo Finance (155.9 million) were respectively flat and up 3% compared with last year.

• Among the 50 most-visited news sites in the country only 11 grew their visits month-on-month in December.
• Visits to the UK publisher’s site were up 29% month-on-month to 24.3 million, making it the second-fastest growing news site in the US, according to data from digital intelligence platform, Similarweb.
• Year-on-year, however, Athlon (athlonsports.com) saw the greatest growth in the top 50, drawing in 697% more visits in July 2024 than in July 2023.
• Two lawmakers are accusing the government of improperly redacting some people’s names from the Epstein files, including six men whose identities are now public.
• Market data provided by Factset.

The father of a US-based Hong Kong activist is convicted under national security law

Two-thirds of the top news sites in the US saw traffic shrink month-on-month in August following a bumper July. Despite its robust politics offering, Axios (23.3 million) was the top 50 site with the largest monthly traffic fall, losing 17.4% of its visits compared with September. Fox also lost approximately 1% of its US web visits in October compared with the month before.

The Pima County Sheriff’s Department in Arizona has detained a person of interest connected with Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance, according to two law enforcement sources. Family seeks answers in death of newlywed who disappeared in 2005 while on Mediterranean honeymoon cruise. A NASA mission is underway to map the heliosphere, which is a huge protective bubble College agriculture around the solar system that was created by the sun. NASA plans to test the planned leak repair with a second dress rehearsal fueling test later this month. The new crew will replace four station fliers who returned to Earth ahead of schedule last month due to a medical issue.

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.

Person detained in Guthrie case released, six ‘powerful’ men named for Epstein ties

The BBC recorded 100.2 million website visits in the US in July, according to digital intelligence platform Similarweb. 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. India Times (up 33% to 26.9 million), aggregator Newsbreak (32.2 million) and Alabama-focused al.com (18.9 million) also saw double-digit year-on-year growth in August.

British news site The Independent (34.8 million), which claimed in November to have become the biggest British-born news site in the US according to Comscore data, also notched 70.4% year-on-year growth. All but one of the ten most-visited news sites in the US, and almost four in five of the top 50, grew their visits compared with September. Most of the top newsbrands in the US saw web traffic growth in October following two months of declines. Year-on-year the fastest-growing top ten news site was the AP, which saw 162.5% more visits in November 2024 than it did in the same month in 2023. Most of the ten most-visited news sites in the US benefitted from the November surge, with The New York Times (528.6 million, up 11% month-on-month), USA Today (203.5 million, up 9.8%) and CNN (460 million, up 8.2%) all notching notable gains. Three in five of the top 50 most-visited news sites in the US saw traffic grow compared with October — although there were some notable exceptions.

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.