AP Photo/Evan Vucci
CNN and NBC News saw the traffic on their websites surge ahead of the competition in July, a month in which one presidential candidate survived an assassination attempt and a sitting president ended his bid for a second term.
CNN.com won the month with an astounding 133 million unique visitors during 31 days of news cycles that included former President Donald Trump being grazed in the ear by a would-be assassin’s bullet and President Joe Biden exiting the 2024 presidential race.
According to ratings from Comscore, NBC News Group properties attracted a total of 160 million unique visitors — its biggest audience ever — with NBCNews.com accounting for 115 million of them, its closest ever gap with reigning dot com titan CNN.
NBC News enjoyed its second busiest traffic month in its history and its busiest July on record – trailing in unique visitors only behind March 2020, when the Covid pandemic swept the globe.
Fox News, The New York Times, and CBS News rounded out the top five with 94 million, 88 million, and 78 million
July not only saw the attempted assassination of Trump and the exit of Biden from the race but also the emergence of Vice President Kamala Harris as her party’s nominee for president.
The month also saw the resignation of former Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez — an NBC News scoop — and the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin just days after Trump was shot in an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
NBC News has seen its web traffic steadily increase in recent years. It’s been under new leadership since January 2023, when the network tapped Rebecca Blumenstein from the New York Times to serve as president of editorial.