• by Tony Silber , November 17, 2021

The top 25 digital news sites experienced a near-universal decline in traffic for the month of October, compared to the same month in 2020, with just three of the 25 reporting increases.

The traffic data, drawn from ComScore MediaMetrix shows Politico.com with a decline of 48% from October 2020, from 44.7 million visitors to 23.2 million. Vox.com declined by 44.5%, from 34.3 million to 19.1 million visitors. The Hill.com, ABCNews.com and TheGuardian.com each experienced a decline of more than 30%. The Los Angeles Times, TheWashington Post, The Atlantic, Forbes.com and Vice Media all declined by more than 20%.

Rounding out the list of double-digit traffic losses were The New York Times, USA Today, CNBC, Huffington Post, Axios and Time.

Only three sites experienced traffic increases from October 2020. Two — Yahoo News (38.8% and BuzzFeed (33.2%) — were robust, while Business Insider barely increased at 0.8%.

CNN.com, the digital news website with the most traffic, declined by 9.1% in October 2021, compared to October 2020, with traffic at 133.3 million this year, compared to 146.7 million last year. The second-most popular site, Yahoo News, increased from 70.7 million to 98.3 million, catapulting over TheNew York Times, Vox Media and Fox News.

For the most part, the biggest traffic losers were political sites — Politico, Vox.com and The Hill. It’s easy to explain why their traffic declined — it’s not election season. American politics, while still fraught in historic ways, is not quite as volatile as October 2020. The declines also follow a yearlong pattern.