As we reported earlier this week, CNN objected to part of a study released by the Pew Research Center, “The State of the News Media 2015,” which described Fox News as an emerging force in digital news.
In its original report, Pew stated that “some evidence suggests that Fox News Channel is an audience leader online, and not just on television,” using web traffic data from the month of January to show that FoxNews.com outperformed both CNN.com and MSNBC.com.
Now, Pew has revised its report and retracted its original numbers, issuing a new section of the annual report and saying: “In digital traffic, CNN and Fox News outpace MSNBC.” A note has been added:
Note: In new conversations with comScore, Pew Research Center was informed of and provided with new digital populations that are inclusive of app traffic and in the case of CNN the addition of some sub-domains which are tracked separately in comScore. For most other news entities analyzed in this report, all relevant sub-domains are already included. In addition, Total Digital Population is the unduplicated combination of the desktop (web browsing and video) and mobile (websites and apps where applicable) traffic figures. For that reason, desktop and mobile figures combined may exceed the total digital population number.
While Fox News shows strength in the digital space, the re-issued numbers put CNN on top:
Here’s how Pew explains its data:
The exact measures get complicated due to how news entities organize their data. Web traffic data taken from a sample month, January 2015 (including desktop, mobile and apps), shows the total digital traffic for FoxNews.com at about 55 million unique visitors. In the same month, CNN’s total digital traffic amounted to around 64 million unique visitors and MSNBC’s roughly 7 million.
All three of these are a part of larger digital networks. For example, MSNBC.com sits within the broader NBC News family (NBCNews.com drew about 30 million unique visitors in January 2015).
Fox News can point to strong growth in digital–even outperforming CNN among mobile users in the Pew study–and in a ranking of the top fifty online news brands, Fox has the best user engagement–the only news brand to break an average of five minutes per visit.