What’s the Most Popular News Site in America? The Answer Might Surprise You

It has now become quite common for people to get the majority of their news online. Long gone are the days when people would watch the news on TV, and print based news publications have been declining for quite some time now as well. However, it is important to note that not all of the news that people obtain is coming from social media. It has also become fairly common for people to go to various websites in search of news and the like.

The most popular news site in America right now would probably end up surprising you quite a bit because you would not expect this site to have any real relevance right now. The site that we are referring to is Yahoo! News. This site receives 175 million unique visitors each year which makes it even more popular than Google News which only receives 150 million unique visitors a year! It turns out that Yahoo has actually managed to beat Google (in terms of news consumption) is something which will come as a shock to many.

As per the data collected by SEMRush, the third most visited site for news is Huffington Post which receives 110 million unique visitors a year. This is followed by CNN with 95 million, New York Times with 70 million, Fox News with 65 million and NBC news with 63 million. The fact that the topmost visited news sites are both owned by search engines is rather telling. It shows just how important search engines are in the modern internet landscape, and they form a crucial component of how people end up interacting with news on a more or less regular basis.

However, even sites that receive a relatively lower amount of monthly visitors would still be relevant in certain states in the US. For example, while the Los Angeles Times only gets around 32.5 million unique visitors a month, it is the single most popular news site in California which makes sense since that is the audience that it is attempting to cater to. Similarly, while USA today receives a relatively low 34 million unique visitors per year, it is the most popular site in states like South Dakota, Nebraska and Michigan.

Yahoo! News, on the other hand, is mostly popular in the southern states such as Texas and Nevada. These states are relatively more populous than others which means that the popularity of this site in this area helps give it a huge number of annual visitors. An interesting factoid is that Yahoo News, Google News and Huffington Post all get the most number of searches from Eureka, California which means that the people of this city might be a little more inclined towards multiple news sources than others.

Meanwhile, the Northeast states such as New York tend to lean towards CNN which goes with the Democratic lean that these states normally display. All in all, news websites seem to be doing extremely well for themselves, and this indicates a shift in how people would be willing to consume news in the first place. The success of these news sites might make more investment come into this sector as well in the future.

The Most Searched News Sites by State - infographic

Read next: UK's News Consumption Report Shows Young People Abandoning TV, Preferring Internet Sources
Previous Post Next Post