News publishers didn’t sustain a traffic bump in the 2024 presidential election week like they did in 2020

Traffic to the top 50 news websites (like CNN.com and NBCNews.com) on Election Day 2024 (Nov. 5), however, was 6.8% higher compared to Election Day 2020 (Nov. 3). But traffic to those sites on the day after the 2024 presidential election (Nov. 6) was about 20% less than the day after Joe Biden’s win in 2020.

Traffic from the day before Election Day 2024 through Saturday had 20.9% less traffic to the top 50 websites when measured against the comparable six days in 2020, according to Similarweb data shared with Digiday.

For example, the news site that brought in the most traffic on Election Day was CNN.com (after Yahoo, which is arguably more of a news aggregator), with 57.9 million visits on November 5, 2024. That was compared to 54.3 million on November 3, 2020, according to the data. CNN.com had 51.3 million visits on the day after Election Day in 2024, compared to 81.1 million visits on November 4, 2020.

A CNN spokesperson told Digiday that this traffic “ranks in the top 10 of best days in CNN’s history and ranks ahead of Election Day 2016 and on par with the historic COVID-fueled Election Day 2020.” They noted there were 35 million unique visitors on its Election Day live story, making it the biggest piece of content for the year on the site.

That was also the case for NYTimes.com, which had about 29.4 million site visits on Nov. 5 and 33 million visits on Nov. 6 2024, compared to 36 million visits on Nov. 3 and 61 million visits on Nov. 4 2020. 

The New York Times declined to comment on this trend. A Times spokesperson noted that its email audience had grown “substantially” in past few years, and that this audience for the day of and day after Election Day was close to “three-times” that of the 2020 election, they said.

Similarweb’s data isn’t necessarily surprising. This year, the presidency was decided the day after Election Day, while in 2020 the race wasn’t called until the weekend. As Digiday reported last week, total U.S. traffic to the top 100 news and media sites was about 4.6% lower in the week leading up to the 2024 election compared with the 2020 election.

Mollie Muchna, project manager at Trusting News — an organization that aims to help journalists earn news consumers’ trust — pointed to the growing trend of news avoidance as one of the possible reasons for less traffic going to news sites around Election Day, as well as younger generations choosing to get their information from content creators on social media platforms, rather than traditional news sources and outlets.

Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of audience development and marketing firm Twenty-First Digital, also reiterated the changes in where and how people are getting their news since the last presidential election, with more people turning to video and audio rather than text articles, she told Digiday last week.

But there were a number of anomalies. Some publishers saw more traffic this year compared to the election in 2020. NBCNews.com, for example, had about 23.9 million site visits on Nov. 5 and 20.4 million visits on Nov. 6 2024, compared to 8 million visits on Nov. 3 and 12.2 million visits on Nov. 4 2020.

Time had 1.9 million visitors on Election Day 2024 and 1.3 million the day after, compared to about 676,000 on Nov. 2 and 1 million on Nov. 4 2020.

Time editor in chief Sam Jacobs said this was likely due to being more prepared for any outcome in this year’s presidential election.

“We were [more] in the moment as we were in 2020 where it took… three and a half days at least for that decision to come in. And I think in some ways, we were very prepared for any number of outcomes. I think the fact that we were able to produce just such a variety of journalism under such difficult conditions so quickly hopefully is one of the reasons why we saw larger audiences this time compared to four years ago,” he said.