CNN Digital Traffic Drops in Sync with Ratings After Trump Town Hall

May’s 25% drop in prime-time ratings was matched by a 6.6% drop in web traffic

Before Chris Licht was fired as CEO of CNN earlier this month, he made a big bet on a Town Hall event featuring Donald J. Trump as a way of burnishing the network’s reputation for unbiased journalism – and also a sure-fire way of boosting CNN’s audience.

It hasn’t worked out that way for either CNN’s ratings, digital traffic, or reputation. The reputational damage was magnified by the PR disaster of a fly-on-the-wall profile in The Atlantic Monthly titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,” which captured Licht’s planning of and hopes for the Town Hall as well as his realization that it had not gone well. While the reputational damage was significant, probably a bigger factor in his dismissal was that his tactics failed to bring in a larger audience for CNN. Although the Trump Town Hall did bring in 3.3 million cable viewers, the critical “prime time demo” ratings for May wound up being down 25%, year-over-year.

Also in May, US web traffic was down 6.6% year-over-year. Traffic was also depressed in February, March, and April – by more than 20% in February and March. A year ago, CNN scrapped plans for a CNN+ streaming service, but digital news remains an important element of the company’s success.

Key takeaways

• In May, CNN web traffic was down 6.6%, despite all the positive and negative attention generated by the Trump Town Hall. Worldwide, traffic to cnn.com was down 8.2%.
• Fox News is also seeing web traffic drop, along with ratings, following the departure of star anchor Tucker Carlson. US web traffic for foxnews.com was down 5% year-over-year in May.
• Meanwhile, US web traffic for msnbc.com was up 37.5% year-over-year in May. MSNBC is enjoying a surge in interest propelled by the multiple indictments of Donald Trump. Although its website gets far less traffic than either cnn.com or foxnews.com, MSNBC recently topped CNN and Fox with its prime-time coverage of the unsealing of the latest Trump indictment and Monday’s arraignment in Miami.
• CNN remains one of the top destinations for online news in the US, attracting 430.6 million visits in May, only slightly less than the New York Times, which got 432 million visits.
• The New York Times has also seen web traffic dip on a year-over-year basis for the past several months – although that seems to be mostly the effect of comparison with peak traffic months in early 2022 when the Wordle online game it had purchased was all the rage. Over the past two years, the Times has clearly grown its online traffic – by 40% in the US and by 49% worldwide. Traffic to cnn.com dropped by nearly 2% over the same period.

CNN draws a lot of traffic but is not growing it

CNN’s web presence is significantly bigger than foxnews.com and much bigger than msnbc.com.

However, MSNBC has been growing traffic more consistently than either CNN or Fox News in recent months.

CNN has been in the news for the wrong reasons

Those who cover the news don’t necessarily like to be “the story” – particularly when it’s a bad story. But the news analysis and commentary on plans for a Trump Town Hall tended to be highly critical, and The Atlantic Monthly’s story created the impression that Licht was adrift in his job and in deep trouble with his superiors. He only lasted a few weeks after it was published.

The article was one of the most-read stories on theatlantic.com in the early days of June, accounting for about 38% of the traffic to the website on June 7, the day Licht’s ouster was announced.

Not the only site to see traffic slump

Whether or not the controversy over the Trump Town Hall event had a cause-and-effect on CNN’s traffic slump is not necessarily clear, and the controversies over Chris Licht’s leadership could be mostly insider baseball of more interest to journalists than their readers and viewers. News ratings and web traffic rise and fall with the pace of news and the public’s interest in it, as well as the quality of the execution from a publication or news network.

In context, May’s drop in traffic for CNN was consistent with what we saw from other news operations in May. Among the news outlets we’ve been following regularly, only People Magazine and the Wall Street Journal saw traffic rise year-over-year.

However, even if we look at the data over a longer time horizon – the last year of data, versus the 12 months before that – CNN is down 5.1%, while key rivals are seeing traffic growth, including the New York Times (+16.9%) and MSNBC (+17.5%).

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Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".