New York Times March Traffic Down 42.6%; Down 18.7% for the Quarter

News and Media traffic report finds major news outlets couldn’t match peak traffic days of March 2022

March traffic to nytimes.com was down 42.6% year-over-year, according to Similarweb estimates. This was the second straight month of decline, interrupting a strong pattern of growth, with worldwide traffic to nytimes.com over the past 12 months up 44% from the previous year.

The monthly year-over-year drop reflects a tough comparison with March 2022 – a big news month because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That was also a peak traffic period for Wordle, the popular word game the Times added to its portfolio of lifestyle and entertainment properties in February 2022.

Some competing sites also showed the effect of lowered appetite for news – for example, traffic was down 28.2% for cnn.com and 24.2% for washingtonpost.com – but the Times also lost 8.2 points of share from among the leading news and media websites we monitor.

Key takeaways

• The New York Times website attracted almost 600 million visits in March, down 42.6% from over 1 billion visits in March 2022. That includes traffic to the Times media and lifestyle properties that are part of nytimes.com, such as its cooking website, but not independent sites the Times company owns such as The Athletic. Traffic to theathletic.com was up 44% year-over-year in March.
• March was the second month that traffic to the New York Times dipped year-over-year, making for an 18.7% drop for the quarter.
• CNN attracted 598 million worldwide visits, nearly equaling the total for the New York Times.
• The People Magazine website, people.com, showed the biggest year-over-year gain among these sites, up 13.1% in March.

The New York Times and CNN sink the most … in comparison to past success

Both the Times and CNN showed marked drops on a year-over-year basis, while Fox News and the Wall Street Journal showed smaller drops.

A look at the traffic pattern over the past year shows that March 2022 was a big traffic month, particularly for the New York Times and CNN, the two seeing the biggest year-over-year drop now.

Part of the reason the Times seems to have experienced a steeper drop is that the enthusiasm for Wordle isn’t quite what it was a year ago. Visits to the Wordle page on nytimes.com were down nearly 70% year-over-year in March.

News traffic trended up, compared with February

The month-over-month comparisons looked better, for almost all of these publications with the exception of People. Traffic to the Wall Street Journal website was up 21.8% in March (but down 8.6% year-over-year).

A drop in share for the New York Times

The worldwide share of traffic to the New York Times from within this competitive set dropped 8.2 points, while Fox News, The New York Post, USA Today, and People each gained a couple of points (+2.4 for Fox News). CNN was down slightly, 1.2 points.

The New York Times and CNN remain the news leaders

For a sense of proportion, although both the New York Times and CNN saw a dip, they remain the news market leaders by a wide margin.

And despite seeming to stumble in March, the New York Times established an enviable record of growth over the past year. Even with the drop in the latest quarter, on an annualized basis traffic to nytimes.com was up 44%.

The media properties mentioned in this report owned by public companies include the New York Times (NYSE: NYT), People Magazine (part of IAC, NYSE: IAC), the New York Post, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal (News Corp, NASDAQ: NWSA), CNN (Warner Brothers Discovery, NYSE: WBD), and USA Today (Gannett, NYSE: GCI). The Washington Post is owned by Nash Holdings, which is controlled by Jeff Bezos.

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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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".