'Washington Times' Overtakes The 'Examiner' As Nation's No. 2 Right-Wing News Site
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, May 27, 2020
For the first time in nearly two years, digital traffic to The Washington Times exceeded that of rival The Washington Examiner, which has become one of the fastest-growing conservative news websites, according to the most recent edition of TheRighting, a research and publishing company that tracks the audience growth of right-wing media in the United States.
The Washington Times' traffic soared 229% in April vs. the same month a year ago, making it the second-most visited right-leaning website of the month.
While The Washington Examiner also experienced healthy growth -- with unique visitor traffic growing 62% -- it nonetheless dropped to third place behind the Times.
"Overall, extensive coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic helped all conservative websites in TheRighting’s top 20 right-wing websites post positive gains, with 45% of them experiencing triple-digit gains," the new report notes.
By comparison, three leading U.S. mainstream news sources tracked by TheRighting, also experienced significant growth.
The Washington Post and The New York Times both had unique vistor gains of 35%, while CNN.com rose 33% for the month.
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The Washington Times and Examiner are "right-wing" while the New York Times and CNN are "mainstream"? This is why trust in media is plunging.
@Thomas Pick: That's TheRighting's classification, not ours. It's also how other objective sources (ie. Wikipedia) classifiy them. The Washington Times' own tagline says it's "the Right opinion."
Understood Joe, but "right-wing" is pejorative. "Conservative" or "right-of-center" are more neutral terms that communicate the same point. CNN is very open about its bias. The New York Times isn't far behind. "Liberal" or "left-leaning" would be more accurate descriptors than "mainstream" and few reasonable people would argue with those labels.
@Thomas Pick: If right wing is a pejorative, then why do conservative media brand themselves that way? As I noted, The Washington Times uses it in their tagline.
Or Fox News' Fox Nation too:
https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/fox-news-unveils-fox-nation-slogan-opinion-done-right-1202958247/
I wonder how these "Uniques" are calculated. If a desktop PC logs into the Fox News website and later, the same person logs in via a smartphone is that one person reached---as it should be---or is it two persons reached---which it shouldn't be?
@Ed Papazian: This is how Comscore describes it:
Unique visitors is a measure of how many unique (i.e. different) individuals visit a site over some period of time. This is an appropriate metric to quantify the size of the unduplicated audience a site reaches. Combining the unique visitor metric with the frequency of visits, you have a measure of both reach and loyalty.
https://www.comscore.com/ger/Insights/Blog/A-Metric-for-Every-Reason