Digital 100 News & Media Winner: Forever Mom

The top website on our list, forever-mom.com, appears to have achieved particularly strong success in capturing referral and display ad traffic in the last months of 2022. The slant toward referrals is particularly noticeable for desktop web traffic. In November, when the site’s traffic peaked at more than 3 million visits, more than 83% of desktop visitors were new to the site – and that share was well over 90% in some previous months.

Mobile web users, who made up more than 97% of forever-mom.com’s audience, were more likely to go directly to the website, but the referrals channel was a close second.

Forever Mom is one of two parenting-focused publications on the list, along with parentmood.com at #5, with traffic up 513%, year-over-year.

The News in Maps

Although celebrity news and lifestyle domains also did well, a very different focus drove traffic to our #2 website, liveuamap.com, which owes its current popularity to news of the war in Ukraine.

The Live Universal Awareness Map (“Liveuamap”) takes a “map-first” approach to analyzing war and humanitarian news. In other words, the home page view of the news is an interactive infographic, a map showing hotspots of activity that allows visitors to click for more information or links to articles. Although it also covers other crisis zones, the war in Ukraine is currently front and center. We can’t prove but might guess that a large part of its U.S. audience consists of Ukrainians living abroad with an intense interest in the progress of the war.

Liveuamap was one of a handful of websites we studied that ranked across multiple geographies, (#1 News & Media in France and Germany; #2 in the U.K. as well as the U.S.).

Compared with the other Digital 100 News & Media winners, Liveuamap drove the most traffic from search, social, and direct traffic channels.

Of the larger mainstream news sites, nytimes.com didn’t make it into our top 10 but still showed impressive growth, with traffic up 55%, year-over-year, to about 500 million monthly visits – even if that growth may have owed more to its cooking site and acquisition of the Wordle word game than to hard news coverage.

More from the Digital 100

For more details, visit the Similarweb Insights blog for posts on individual categories. A series of infographics are also available for the media and use on social media.

Eligibility criteria: The rankings are based on industry categories Similarweb tracks on an ongoing basis, ranked based on year-over-year change in their total traffic for 2022 over 2021. To qualify for the U.S. ranking, a domain had to average at least 100,000 monthly views for 2022 and 50,000 for 2021. Domains that had no measurable traffic at the beginning of 2021 were also eliminated.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

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