Drudge Tops Google, Yahoo & CNN

Digital Vision | 19 April 2017

The latest SimilarWeb US Media Publications ranking is here!

While the Trump Administration continues to drive traffic to media publications in the US, this month saw several other news items driving audience interests – most notably March Madness, but also anticipated tech releases, and global news items.

Notable Increases in SimilarWeb Ranking

All sports related publishers saw a boost in their traffic and engagement metrics in March 2017, except for si.com which dipped slightly following its seasonal, swimsuit-driven peak. At the top of the table, espn.com jumped up by two spaces into second place overall. Meanwhile, cbssports.com had the biggest leap, up by 33 positions, mostly due to their coverage of the NCAA games: traffic to the site peaked on the first day of the games, with 4.73M visitors on March 16th, 147% more than an average day in March.NCAA bracket was the second most popular keyword (after cbs sports) driving the site’s desktop visits from search.

News surrounding the releases of the Nintendo Switch and Samsung’s Galaxy S8 helped CBS’s cnet.com move up by two positions on our board, settling in the 14th place.

Additional winners this month include two properties owned by the same man, Mortimer Zuckerman. The sites nydailynews.com and usnews.com, improved by 5 and 12 positions, respectively. These jumps may be attributed to some highly viral pieces of content published on the sites – the photo gallery “Deadly Attack Outside UK Parliament in London” and “Editorial Cartoons on Donald Trump” are the most visited pages on each site. The latter, specifically, has been the most popular among visitors to usnews.com since January 2017.

Finally, March 6th was the single busiest day across all US publications due to news about the revised US travel ban (removing Iraq from the list), and North Korea firing missiles towards Japan.

Top Non-Branded Keywords

While the Trump administration continues to be a significant force in non-branded keywords (Trump alone is responsible for 4.45% of the traffic), we are also seeing an increased interest in tech (Nintendo Switch, Galaxy S8) and other news (London, North Korea, China). Below are the top non-branded keywords driving traffic to publishing websites in the US in March 2017: