All the world’s top ten English-language news websites saw year-on-year traffic drops in December for the second consecutive month, according to Press Gazette’s updated ranking.
The drops may be the result of updates rolled out by Google to its search algorithm since September, which have tended to downgrade SEO-explainer style articles.
Among the top ten news sites by number of visits, Microsoft aggregator MSN saw the biggest slump in traffic for the second month in a row (663.8 million visits, down 25% year-on-year), followed by Google News (381 million) and CNN (500.9 million) both down by 17%, according to data from digital intelligence platform Similarweb.
Fox News (286.6 million visits, down 14% year-on-year), Daily Mail (376.4 million, down 13%) and the BBC (1 billion, down 12%) also saw double-digit falls.
Month-on-month the top ten news sites fared better with all but CNN (down 2% month-on-month) seeing their traffic increase or remain stable. The Daily Mail saw the biggest month-on-month growth in visits at 8%, followed by the New York Times (up 7%, 612.3 million visits).
Fastest-growing year-on-year among the whole top 50 was Newsweek (83.6 million visits, up 101%), which knocked The Times of…
