Top news sites collectively received 7.5% fewer visits on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the 2024 US election than they did on those days in 2020, data from Similarweb shows.

The Associated Press, Substack and Axios were among the sites with the most growth between the two elections, while Politico, Fox News, The Guardian and The New York Times all lost substantial proportions of their traffic – according to Similarweb.

After aggregator Yahoo.com (130.6 million visits on Tuesday 5 and Wednesday 6 November) CNN was the most-visited news site in the US, drawing 109.1 million clicks. That figure is down 19.4% on the same days in the 2020 election.

The New York Times (62.4 million) was the second most-visited publisher, but its traffic too dropped 36.3%. Fox News, the third most popular publisher on the list, saw traffic drop 46.8% when compared with the 2020 election, the fifth-largest fall among the top 50 most-visited sites.

Among the ten most-visited news sites over election night, Fox was the biggest faller, followed by The New York Times and CNN. The AP (47.6 million visits, up 247.1%) was the biggest gainer, followed by NBC News (44.3 million, up 120.2%) and USA Today (27.7 million, up 70.1%). The rest of the top ten saw single-digit percentage point changes.

The significant declines at the most-visited sites may reflect broader news avoidance trends or the relative speed with which the result of the 2024 election became clear. The 2020 election, in comparison, took days to be called.

Among the broader top 50 election night news sites the fastest grower was Axios, which saw visits grow 291.7% from 1.8 million in 2020 to 7.2 million last week.

Faster growing still was publishing platform Substack (5.1 million, up 423.1%), which hosts publications by numerous journalists and was less than three years old at the time of the last election.

Web culture site The Daily Dot (2.2m, up 287.5%), Al Jazeera (3.3 million, up 204.2%) and People magazine (11.5 million, up 115.5%) also substantially outperformed their 2020 traffic totals.

The biggest fall, on the other hand, was at Politico (8.8 million visits in 2024, down 63.7% from its 2020 total of 24.3 million), followed by Yahoo News (5.4 million, down 54.8%) and Business Insider (4.2 million, down 48.8%). The Guardian (10.6 million, down 45.2%) Google News (11.3 million, down 40.2%) and Breitbart (3.9 million, down 48.5%) were all also significantly hit.

NBC News, Associated Press and climate site The Cooldown saw largest election week traffic surges

Similarweb data also shows that, among the 100 top news sites in the US, NBC News saw the largest week-on-week increase in its web traffic over the week of the election, with visits nearly tripling compared with the week before.

Climate website The Cooldown saw a comparable increase of 209.4% and the AP received 207% more traffic than the previous week.

A handful of sites saw fewer visits the week of the election than the week before, among them Cosmopolitan (down 15.1%), Variety (down 13.2%) and Vogue (down 8%).

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