BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post Crush Legacy Outlets in Traffic Growth
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May 21, 2014


Over the past year, the number of people visiting BuzzFeed.com more than tripled and the number visiting The Huffington Post nearly doubled, according to analytics firm comScore Inc.

During the same period — from March 2013 to March 2014 – the number of unique visitors to The New York Times’ website rose only 15 percent, and the online audience for The Washington Post grew 20 percent, comScore data shows.

The traffic numbers appear to reflect a disparity in traffic growth between digital-native sites and legacy media, similar to one noted last week in the leaked “Innovation Report” written by an internal group that studied the digital strategy at The New York Times. That 97-page report concluded that The Times was “falling behind” its rivals in digital audience development, and it named companies it considered rivals, including BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post.

To see how fast each has been growing, AJR asked comScore to break out the latest web traffic numbers for some of the Internet’s top standalone news sites.

Typically, comScore reports aggregate traffic counts for groups of websites owned by a single company, rather than for a particular site. (See AJR’s separate story on traffic counts for those company-owned collections of sites, which comScore calls “properties.”)

Here, then, are the unique visitor counts for the specific news sites requested by AJR, ranked by their growth rates over the past year.

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