Google News has been in the news itself lately, from European efforts to impose taxes to questions about its value and even suggestions for giving it a full redesign. But just how much traffic is it currently driving to publishers?
In working with a wide range of news and content sites, I know that becoming an approved source and maximizing Google News visibility (through avoiding news crawl errors and editorial optimization) continue to be important priorities.
But I was curious how much news search traffic sites are currently receiving and what percentage of total search traffic it represents.
To find out, I used SimilarWeb PRO to pull 2014 YTD figures for 80 major news sites representing a cross-section of print, broadcast and digital news organizations. My primary focus was mainstream news sites in the US, but to round things out I included some international and tech news sites too.
This is not intended to be a comprehensive list or a definitive ranking. But I’ve included enough sites to provide a good sense of the current news search opportunity for publishers.
SimilarWeb provides data on total search visits for a particular domain as well as a breakdown by vertical, for example:
For each site I captured total search visits for January through November 2014 and the percentage coming from news search, then used that to calculate the number of news search visits for each site.
[UPDATE: There were some questions about what qualifies as “news search” so I clarified this with SimilarWeb. The figures include clicks directly from Google News (i.e. news.google.com) as well as clicks from the News tab on Google search results pages. They do not include clicks from the “In the news” onebox in the main Web search results.
The news onebox tends to be a big traffic driver for news sites, which increases the Google News opportunity for publishers even further.]
SimilarWeb reports on search traffic from all engines so the news search data includes more than just Google News. However in going through the profiles it is clear that the vast majority of news search visits are coming from Google, as shown in this example:
So this data is a reasonable proxy for capturing Google News traffic. Keep in mind that figures from any third-party tool are an approximation. But the data offers a way to do a relative comparison of the news sites.
News Sites Ranked by Google News Traffic
Here are the 80 sites ranked by total news search visits from January-November 2014:
| Site | News search visits (Jan-Nov 2014) | Percentage of total search visits |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | usatoday.com | 104,104,800 | 30.44% |
| 2 | reuters.com | 84,681,000 | 43.65% |
| 3 | nytimes.com | 84,047,400 | 19.08% |
| 4 | dailymail.co.uk | 72,220,200 | 7.88% |
| 5 | nydailynews.com | 69,669,950 | 29.71% |
| 6 | foxnews.com | 69,631,200 | 27.36% |
| 7 | telegraph.co.uk | 65,805,850 | 16.39% |
| 8 | latimes.com | 63,150,000 | 30.00% |
| 9 | abcnews.go.com | 62,533,200 | 25.42% |
| 10 | washingtonpost.com | 61,123,650 | 25.31% |
| 11 | cnn.com | 61,089,600 | 12.48% |
| 12 | cnet.com | 57,178,200 | 4.09% |
| 13 | huffingtonpost.com | 48,295,900 | 6.26% |
| 14 | timesofindia.indiatimes.com | 46,715,800 | 14.33% |
| 15 | wsj.com | 45,195,000 | 23.00% |
| 16 | theguardian.com | 39,422,400 | 7.64% |
| 17 | nbcnews.com | 38,994,750 | 29.43% |
| 18 | chron.com | 37,699,200 | 16.83% |
| 19 | businessweek.com | 36,614,100 | 28.83% |
| 20 | time.com | 36,069,300 | 16.47% |
| 21 | lemonde.fr | 32,708,850 | 21.59% |
| 22 | independent.co.uk | 29,110,200 | 14.34% |
| 23 | csmonitor.com | 28,776,370 | 46.19% |
| 24 | cbc.ca | 26,088,300 | 18.18% |
| 25 | sfgate.com | 25,032,000 | 20.86% |
| 26 | bloomberg.com | 22,170,400 | 14.98% |
| 27 | smh.com.au | 20,379,640 | 23.08% |
| 28 | forbes.com | 20,317,500 | 6.30% |
| 29 | news.yahoo.com | 14,572,500 | 6.70% |
| 30 | nationalpost.com | 12,681,900 | 32.94% |
| 31 | chicagotribune.com | 11,938,950 | 19.35% |
| 32 | examiner.com | 10,741,600 | 4.64% |
| 33 | mercurynews.com | 9,352,210 | 34.51% |
| 34 | businessinsider.com | 8,927,100 | 5.46% |
| 35 | ft.com | 8,802,760 | 19.22% |
| 36 | thedailybeast.com | 8,548,390 | 13.81% |
| 37 | bbc.com | 8,402,550 | 4.17% |
| 38 | fortune.com | 7,871,480 | 12.28% |
| 39 | wired.com | 7,675,200 | 11.70% |
| 40 | boston.com | 7,576,870 | 22.09% |
| 41 | news.com.au | 7,140,240 | 12.66% |
| 42 | spiegel.de | 7,026,580 | 9.02% |
| 43 | bostonglobe.com | 7,016,820 | 28.18% |
| 44 | pbs.org | 6,744,500 | 6.58% |
| 45 | politico.com | 6,481,750 | 23.57% |
| 46 | nypost.com | 6,378,400 | 9.52% |
| 47 | slate.com | 6,322,720 | 9.19% |
| 48 | usnews.com | 5,627,700 | 4.81% |
| 49 | theatlantic.com | 5,621,040 | 12.66% |
| 50 | npr.org | 5,214,330 | 6.87% |
| 51 | mashable.com | 4,915,500 | 4.35% |
| 52 | newsweek.com | 4,246,410 | 19.39% |
| 53 | aljazeera.com | 4,062,030 | 8.41% |
| 54 | cnbc.com | 3,866,080 | 6.62% |
| 55 | techcrunch.com | 3,763,800 | 7.65% |
| 56 | salon.com | 3,517,500 | 10.50% |
| 57 | bild.de | 3,452,300 | 3.95% |
| 58 | foxbusiness.com | 3,241,710 | 16.29% |
| 59 | news.sky.com | 3,224,320 | 9.16% |
| 60 | msnbc.com | 3,136,080 | 14.32% |
| 61 | suntimes.com | 2,938,000 | 14.69% |
| 62 | vox.com | 2,762,250 | 7.25% |
| 63 | economist.com | 2,694,510 | 6.37% |
| 64 | theverge.com | 2,183,480 | 3.38% |
| 65 | newyorker.com | 2,086,920 | 7.48% |
| 66 | nymag.com | 2,034,120 | 7.59% |
| 67 | ocregister.com | 1,768,160 | 10.28% |
| 68 | recode.net | 1,689,020 | 10.69% |
| 69 | nationaljournal.com | 1,620,780 | 15.89% |
| 70 | denverpost.com | 1,451,250 | 10.75% |
| 71 | qz.com | 1,191,750 | 11.35% |
| 72 | buzzfeed.com | 1,155,750 | 0.69% |
| 73 | thenextweb.com | 1,092,280 | 3.32% |
| 74 | america.aljazeera.com | 1,030,560 | 9.04% |
| 75 | newser.com | 632,395 | 16.01% |
| 76 | sfexaminer.com | 572,495 | 14.87% |
| 77 | sfchronicle.com | 526,930 | 18.17% |
| 78 | readwrite.com | 472,800 | 4.80% |
| 79 | thefiscaltimes.com | 450,225 | 7.83% |
| 80 | breakingnews.com | 158,730 | 2.22% |
USA Today has received the most Google News traffic by a substantial margin. Reuters and The New York Times are closely bunched in the next tier and the Daily Mail Online is also doing well.
I also included sites like BuzzFeed and Quartz that are known to do much better in social than search. As expected both are near the bottom of the table.
News Sites Ranked by Percentage of Search Traffic from Google News
Here is the same data ranked by percentage of total search visits coming from news search:
| Site | News search visits (Jan-Nov 2014) | Percentage of total search visits |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | csmonitor.com | 28,776,370 | 46.19% |
| 2 | reuters.com | 84,681,000 | 43.65% |
| 3 | mercurynews.com | 9,352,210 | 34.51% |
| 4 | nationalpost.com | 12,681,900 | 32.94% |
| 5 | usatoday.com | 104,104,800 | 30.44% |
| 6 | latimes.com | 63,150,000 | 30.00% |
| 7 | nydailynews.com | 69,669,950 | 29.71% |
| 8 | nbcnews.com | 38,994,750 | 29.43% |
| 9 | businessweek.com | 36,614,100 | 28.83% |
| 10 | bostonglobe.com | 7,016,820 | 28.18% |
| 11 | foxnews.com | 69,631,200 | 27.36% |
| 12 | abcnews.go.com | 62,533,200 | 25.42% |
| 13 | washingtonpost.com | 61,123,650 | 25.31% |
| 14 | politico.com | 6,481,750 | 23.57% |
| 15 | smh.com.au | 20,379,640 | 23.08% |
| 16 | wsj.com | 45,195,000 | 23.00% |
| 17 | boston.com | 7,576,870 | 22.09% |
| 18 | lemonde.fr | 32,708,850 | 21.59% |
| 19 | sfgate.com | 25,032,000 | 20.86% |
| 20 | newsweek.com | 4,246,410 | 19.39% |
| 21 | chicagotribune.com | 11,938,950 | 19.35% |
| 22 | ft.com | 8,802,760 | 19.22% |
| 23 | nytimes.com | 84,047,400 | 19.08% |
| 24 | cbc.ca | 26,088,300 | 18.18% |
| 25 | sfchronicle.com | 526,930 | 18.17% |
| 26 | chron.com | 37,699,200 | 16.83% |
| 27 | time.com | 36,069,300 | 16.47% |
| 28 | telegraph.co.uk | 65,805,850 | 16.39% |
| 29 | foxbusiness.com | 3,241,710 | 16.29% |
| 30 | newser.com | 632,395 | 16.01% |
| 31 | nationaljournal.com | 1,620,780 | 15.89% |
| 32 | bloomberg.com | 22,170,400 | 14.98% |
| 33 | sfexaminer.com | 572,495 | 14.87% |
| 34 | suntimes.com | 2,938,000 | 14.69% |
| 35 | independent.co.uk | 29,110,200 | 14.34% |
| 36 | timesofindia.indiatimes.com | 46,715,800 | 14.33% |
| 37 | msnbc.com | 3,136,080 | 14.32% |
| 38 | thedailybeast.com | 8,548,390 | 13.81% |
| 39 | news.com.au | 7,140,240 | 12.66% |
| 40 | theatlantic.com | 5,621,040 | 12.66% |
| 41 | cnn.com | 61,089,600 | 12.48% |
| 42 | fortune.com | 7,871,480 | 12.28% |
| 43 | wired.com | 7,675,200 | 11.70% |
| 44 | qz.com | 1,191,750 | 11.35% |
| 45 | denverpost.com | 1,451,250 | 10.75% |
| 46 | recode.net | 1,689,020 | 10.69% |
| 47 | salon.com | 3,517,500 | 10.50% |
| 48 | ocregister.com | 1,768,160 | 10.28% |
| 49 | nypost.com | 6,378,400 | 9.52% |
| 50 | slate.com | 6,322,720 | 9.19% |
| 51 | news.sky.com | 3,224,320 | 9.16% |
| 52 | america.aljazeera.com | 1,030,560 | 9.04% |
| 53 | spiegel.de | 7,026,580 | 9.02% |
| 54 | aljazeera.com | 4,062,030 | 8.41% |
| 55 | dailymail.co.uk | 72,220,200 | 7.88% |
| 56 | thefiscaltimes.com | 450,225 | 7.83% |
| 57 | techcrunch.com | 3,763,800 | 7.65% |
| 58 | theguardian.com | 39,422,400 | 7.64% |
| 59 | nymag.com | 2,034,120 | 7.59% |
| 60 | newyorker.com | 2,086,920 | 7.48% |
| 61 | vox.com | 2,762,250 | 7.25% |
| 62 | npr.org | 5,214,330 | 6.87% |
| 63 | news.yahoo.com | 14,572,500 | 6.70% |
| 64 | cnbc.com | 3,866,080 | 6.62% |
| 65 | pbs.org | 6,744,500 | 6.58% |
| 66 | economist.com | 2,694,510 | 6.37% |
| 67 | forbes.com | 20,317,500 | 6.30% |
| 68 | huffingtonpost.com | 48,295,900 | 6.26% |
| 69 | businessinsider.com | 8,927,100 | 5.46% |
| 70 | usnews.com | 5,627,700 | 4.81% |
| 71 | readwrite.com | 472,800 | 4.80% |
| 72 | examiner.com | 10,741,600 | 4.64% |
| 73 | mashable.com | 4,915,500 | 4.35% |
| 74 | bbc.com | 8,402,550 | 4.17% |
| 75 | cnet.com | 57,178,200 | 4.09% |
| 76 | bild.de | 3,452,300 | 3.95% |
| 77 | theverge.com | 2,183,480 | 3.38% |
| 78 | thenextweb.com | 1,092,280 | 3.32% |
| 79 | breakingnews.com | 158,730 | 2.22% |
| 80 | buzzfeed.com | 1,155,750 | 0.69% |
The Christian Science Monitor jumps up to first, with 46.19% of its search traffic coming from news search. Assuming that figure is accurate that’s an unusually high percentage for a site of that type. Reuters is close behind at 43.65%, which is not surprising for a site of that nature.
It’s also interesting that BuzzFeed has the lowest reported percentage with just 0.69% of total search visits coming from news search. A lot of its content obviously wouldn’t qualify as “news” but since they’ve been building up their editorial team and expanding their news coverage there is certainly some opportunity there.
The Opportunity is Still Strong
As shown in this data, Google News is still sending a considerable amount of traffic to news sites. So publishers are right to continue to make it a priority.
I’d also like to point out that this is free traffic (hello Germany). I’d think a thank you is more appropriate than a lawsuit or legislation.
The bottom line: Google News still matters, and news search optimization efforts are worth your time.
Additional Data: News Sites in Spain
The announcement that Google News will close in Spain has prompted interest in getting similar data for Spanish news sites. So I pulled figures for the top 11 news sites in Spain according to ComScore. Thank you to Antonio Rull and Julio Alonso for providing the sites. (They each sent me a ComScore top 10 list but one site was different between them, so I included all 11).
Here are the top 11 news sites in Spain ranked by news search visits from January-November 2014, as reported by SimilarWeb:
| Site | News search visits (Jan-Nov 2014) | Percentage of total search visits |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | abc.es | 8,988,000 | 7.49% |
| 2 | 20minutos.es | 7,818,600 | 4.71% |
| 3 | elpais.com | 6,758,000 | 4.36% |
| 4 | elmundo.es | 6,567,000 | 3.98% |
| 5 | lavanguardia.com | 4,493,600 | 10.96% |
| 6 | europapress.es | 4,259,640 | 13.83% |
| 7 | elperiodico.com | 1,322,100 | 5.85% |
| 8 | elconfidencial.com | 1,305,920 | 3.52% |
| 9 | publico.es | 924,300 | 4.74% |
| 10 | eldiario.es | 663,000 | 5.10% |
| 11 | huffingtonpost.es | 344,240 | 3.31% |
Jim Robinson says
Great point, Adam. I make this case on a regular basis with my clients. Most publishers don’t realize how much traffic they’re getting from Google News because they’re just tracking the referral traffic from the Google News environment and not the onebox traffic from organic results.
With regard to this: “The figures include traffic directly from Google News and well as traffic from embedded news oneboxes in the regular Web search results,” how do you suppose they’re capturing that data? VED parameter?
Adam Sherk says
Thanks Jim. That’s a good question and something I was wondering myself. Here’s some general info on their methodology: http://www.similarweb.com/downloads/our-data-methodology.pdf. I don’t know the details with respect to universal search, and certainly there is some extrapolating going on, but they are able to capture data for a variety of verticals.
With any third party tool the accuracy varies, but overall SimilarWeb seems to do pretty well, so I like using it for basic competitive analysis and doing relative comparisons.
Chris Ward says
Nice post, Adam.
What do you find the main advantage of SimilarWeb to be over SEMRush? I did a demo of SW a while back and they told me that they have the most extensive data set of its kind, so perhaps greater accuracy is one of its selling points. Its basic tier is twice the price of SEMRush though, and the data set only goes back six months.
Adam Sherk says
Chris – I like both and use them both regularly. SimilarWeb is good for overall competitive analysis, in particular drilling down on various sources of traffic to a specific domain (search, social, mobile, direct, ads, etc.). The popular pages and keyword data is helpful too.
SEMrush is good for monitoring fluctuations in search visibility, particularly if there’s been an issue. It’s also good way to get a large amount of keyword data for a particular domain, either for competitive analysis or content ideas.
Adam Sherk says
Jim – I clarified what qualifies as “news search” with SimilarWeb. See the update in the post above.
Reid Williams says
Adam, great work pulling this together — and I know it was a labor of love manually pulling data on all the sites you’ve listed. And obviously, it’s essential for publishers to continue grappling with their relationship to traffic drivers (or stealers, I guess is the argument) such as Google, social platforms, et. al.
I do want to reinforce to your readers, though, that this is not a ranked list of news sites. I know you state this in the text, but enumerating the sites might mislead some people into thinking it is. If it were, in fact, a ranking, there would be several sites placing in the pack: the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News — with which I’m proud to work directly — as well as the Indianapolis Star, Arizona Republic, Cincinnati Enquirer and Nashville Tennessean all have numbers to rank.
Thanks again for the attention you’re bringing to this debate.
Adam Sherk says
Thanks for the feedback Reid, I appreciate it.
I tried to emphasize that I’m comparing a sampling of news sites across various types, with the aim of providing some general insight into Google News traffic for publishers. But I take your point about enumerating the sites.
However I also think that listing them in order based on a couple different criteria is a good way organize the data in terms making it easy for people to process and take something away from it (including how various types of news sites do compared to one another). And purely from a presentation standpoint I think it makes it more interesting too. So it is a ranking, but just a ranking of these specific 80 sites.
I’d have liked to include more, but I was pulling the figures by hand and even 80 took quite a while. The majority of sites I picked have a national or international focus, but I did include some city-specific media too (as well as some tech/Web media) to round things out.
In picking the city-specific media I mainly focused on newspaper sites that were in the top 10-15 of some lists I found online, from which I chose a representative sample to cover that portion of the cross section. So that’s the only reason the sites you mention weren’t included, although I wish now I’d pulled in at least Detroit Free Press as that would have been a good one for this group.
I’ll keep those sites in mind for future comparison posts or any updates to this data.
Antonio Rull says
Would be interesting to analyze news sites in Spain, you know our politicians are killing the service and these numbers are really appreciated these days here. Just saying… 😉
Julio Alonso says
To second Antonio Rull’s request, a few data points on the main Spanish newspapers would be really interesting given their position towards Google News and the recent decision by Google to pull the service out in Spain. The top three are: elpais.com, elmundo.es and abc.es.
Adam Sherk says
That’s a good idea Antonio and Julio, I thought about that after seeing the news about Google News in Spain. Maybe I’ll run some quick numbers and add them in an update. Can you point me to list of top Spanish news sites? A quick search brought up this: allyoucanread.com/spanish-newspapers/. Is it accurate?
Antonio Rull says
You’ve got a ComScore top 10 in your inbox 🙂
Julio Alonso says
Antonio, we both did the same thing 🙂
Rafa Lopez Callejon says
One of the issues was that Google news is an opportunity for less powerful media from provinces to get traffic if they were good with SEO. They can make less political pressure and they are the losers.
Manuela says
Hi, Adam! My name is Manuela, I am a spanish journalist and I am writing an article about this topic. Can I use the data table from Spain quoting your site? Thanks so much. Great work!
Adam Sherk says
Manuela – sure, you are welcome to use it.
Antonio Rull says
It’s interesting what is going on today. news.google.es is not working anymore, but news results are showing both on web search and News search. I think this means news media is not losing anything but less than a 1% of traffic.
Adam Sherk says
Yes, that’s an interesting development. With the “In the News” oneboxes and the separate News tab still functioning, a substantial opportunity for publishers still exists.
David Smethie says
Fascinating study. Thanks for taking so much time to compile the results and share. I had no idea major news outlets got such a high percentage of traffic from Google News. I know a few years ago, internet marketers were trying to game the system, getting sites indexed in Google News to promote affiliate and CPA offers. This obviously didn’t last long. Every once in a while, you’ll see a Google News site being sold on Flippa, and they always sell for a pretty penny 🙂