National Review Leads All Right Wing Websites in September Traffic Growth
TheRighting released its September 2024 election year traffic analysis of mobile and desktop traffic for right wing and mainstream news websites based on Comscore data.
Among the highlights of TheRighting’s September 2024 findings:
ANOTHER MONTH OF DOUBLE-DIGIT TRAFFIC GROWTH FOR TRUTH SOCIAL
For the third consecutive month, the Donald Trump-controlled Truth Social platform generated impressive year-over-year (YOY) increases in unique visitors. While the site didn’t exceed the record-breaking traffic of August and September, it nonetheless posted a 64% increase in unique visitors compared to September 2023.
Here are the unique visitors for the three conservative-friendly social media platforms TheRighting follows:
–Rumble (7,052,000 unique visitors; -7% vs year ago)
–Truth Social (4,187,000; +64% vs year ago)
–Gettr: for the first time since TheRighting has been tracking social media, Gettr’s audience was so small that it could not be measured by Comscore.
SEPTEMBER 2024 VS SEPTEMBER 2023
The majority of right wing news websites experienced declines in YOY traffic. Foxnews.com notched its third straight month of audience gains posting a 9% increase in YOY traffic. The Murdoch-controlled site topped all right wing news websites attracing 85,587,000 unique visitors.
The three mainstream news websites TheRighting follows all generated traffic growth in September. Unique visitors to the NY Times rose 12% in September. The Washington Post eked out a 1% gain, while CNN, which led all news websites with 123,065,000 unique visitors, had a 4% YOY upturn.
YOY Winners and Losers Among Top 20 Right Wing News Websites for September 2024
(by unique visitor percentage increase/decrease from year ago)
Winners
–National Review (+79%)
–The Gateway Pundit (+77%)
–Washington Times (+76%)
Losers
–Townhall (-87%)
–RedState (-77%)
–Washington Examiner (-59%)
SEPTEMBER 2024 VS SEPTEMBER 2020
Newsmax was the only right wing news website monitored by TheRighting that posted an audience gain between September 2020 and September 2024. Traffic surged 98% for Newsmax during this period. Eleven of the 15 sites tracked by TheRighting experienced declines of more than 50%. Townhall led all websites with a 95% nosedive as unique visitors withered from 3,394,000 in September 2020 to just 168,000 in September 2024.
The Daily Beast topped all mainstream and progressive sites with a 21% increase during this period. While the Daily Kos dropped 61%, all other sites in this category had declines under 50%.
“It’s not surprising that so many websites saw dramatic declines in traffic last month, between September 2020 and September 2024,” said Howard Polskin, President, TheRighting. “There were many newsworthy events in September 2020 that captured the attention of news consumers including the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Court, and the first debate between Biden and Trump. And it all happened while the world was in the grip of a deadly pandemic.”
Source: Comscore Media Metrix® Multi-Platform, Custom-defined list, including, but not limited to Foxnews.com, Breitbart.com, DailyCaller.com, WashingtonExaminer.com, WesternJournal.com, Washingtontimes.com, Total Digital Audience, September 2024, U.S.
