Fox News Dominance Expanding to Digital

By Mark Joyella 

Fox News Channel continues to rule the ratings roost, but that new study from the Pew Research Center suggests that dominance may be expanding to include digital as well.

In its State of the News Media report released Wednesday,  Pew looked at web traffic data from comScore. In a sample month, January 2015, FoxNews.com outperformed both CNN.com and MSNBC.com with a total of about 55 million unique visitors. In the same month, CNN.com drew 50 million uniques, and MSNBC.com had  just about 7 million. (NBCNews.com had 30 million unique visitors in the same time period.)

CNN digital executives dispute Pew’s analysis, noting that taking basing an annual study on one month is questionable, but particularly the month of January, when CNN.com was in the midst of a huge re-launch. CNN has also objected to the metrics used, arguing CNN.com was undercounted compared to FoxNews.com. TVNewser understands Pew is evaluating CNN’s request to clarify its data.

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A wider look at news brands found CNN’s network of sites attracted 101 million unique visitors in January, second only to Yahoo-ABC News with nearly 128 million. Fox News’ digital network was ninth, with about 57 million total uniques.

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