New York Times Traffic Stalls, Down 20.7% in February

Similarweb market update for News and Media finds the Times suffering by comparison with February 2022’s big news month plus Wordle

The New York Times has had a strong digital growth story for the past year, but in February it couldn’t top the performance it enjoyed in February 2022, the month it incorporated the Wordle word game into its website. The publication’s growth has been powered as much by lifestyle content such as cooking and games as it has by news content.

The comparative drop in traffic can partly be explained as a tough comparison to the prior February, which was also a big news month – Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Key takeaways

• Traffic to the New York Times website was down 20.7%, year-over-year, in February, based on web traffic from within the U.S. Worldwide, the number of visits was down 27%. Traffic was similarly depressed for the Washington Post (-22.7%) and CNN (-21.5%).
• The People Magazine website enjoyed the strongest year-over-year growth, up 36.4%. The New York Post was up 11.6% and USA Today gained 6.9% year-over-year.
• Every site covered in this report saw a drop in traffic from January to February, with the Washington Post down the most (14.8%) and the New York Times down 14.3%.

A tough year-over-year comparison for the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post

All three of these major news outlets saw a traffic decline.

Everyone dropped, month-over-month

Even those sites that were up year-over-year saw a traffic decline from January to February.

New York Times and CNN share dropped, while others gained

The New York Times’ share of traffic within this competitive set dropped by 3 percentage points, and CNN was down 3 points. People Magazine gained 2.7 points.

The New York Times is the largest by traffic volume

The New York Times had the largest media website by traffic volume, both in the U.S. (416.8 million visits in February) and worldwide (552.5 million), although CNN is close behind.

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 and Fox News (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.

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Methodology

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Image: “newspapers falling from the sky” by DALL-E

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".