The New York Times Grew Traffic 50% in January

News and media digital market share update for January 2023

The New York Times continued a pattern of rapid traffic growth in January, with visits by visitors from within the United States up a whopping 50.2%, year-over-year. Within the competitive set of websites we analyzed, the share of traffic to nytimes.com rose by 6.4 percentage points.

This analysis is part of a series of digital market share reports Similarweb produces to gauge momentum in important markets. It includes major media properties but not web portals such as Yahoo and MSN that also provide news and features.

Key takeaways

• The New York Times has been growing through features such as Wordle and its cooking section, as well as on the basis of news coverage. Traffic has been up by 50% or more, year-over-year, every month since February 2022.
• The next fastest-growing media domain in our analysis, People, grew traffic by 31.2% year-over-year and 14.6% compared with December.
• Traffic to the Washington Post website was down 7.5% year-over-year and dropped 2.8% from December.

The New York Times leads in year-over-year growth

Here is what that pattern of traffic growth looks like for the New York Times and key competitors.

People.com had the biggest gain from December to January

People Magazine’s website showed the biggest monthly gain.

Traffic to nytimes.com was essentially unchanged from December, making them invisible on this chart.

The New York Times also had the share biggest gain

The New York Times also had the biggest gain in the share of traffic captured by these major media sites, adding 6.4 percentage points at the expense of its competitors.

Largest sites: New York Times, CNN, and Fox News

In addition to being fast-growing, the New York Times has one of the most trafficked sites in media, although CNN is a close rival. Although it’s not shown on this graph, Yahoo is more than five times larger by total traffic, albeit from users of its other services like Yahoo Mail as well as readers of its news content.

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 Jeff Bezos through a holding company.

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 to similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Contact: For more information, please write to press@similarweb.com.

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".