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NEW YORK, Dec. 30, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Influential policy and political news site The Hill has emerged as an early winner of the Presidential election, securing the biggest year-over-year increase in traffic among all U.S. publishers.

SimilarWeb, the global leader in digital analytics, has found that the Washington-based site saw 72% year-over-year online traffic growth in an analysis of major U.S publisher's traffic growth in November 2014 and November 2015. The politics news source saw the biggest year-over-year traffic growth among 114 leading publishers studied, increasing their visits from 9.2 million to 15.9 million, based on combined mobile and desktop visits.

The SimilarWeb analysis shows that overall, leading U.S news publishers saw an average year-over-year traffic decline of 14%.

Despite many publishers achieving higher numbers of visits, based solely on year-over-year growth, The Hill was followed by Tech Times (69%), while Bustle, a new media company for millennial women (65% year-over-year growth) continued its impressive momentum.

Other leading publishers sustaining year-over-year growth include Breitbart (55%), Newsweek (32%), iDigital Times (31%), BBC (27%), Vice (25%), New York Post (24%), Mic (13%) and Digital Trends (12%).

The BBC led a UK-contingent including The Daily Telegraph (4%), Mirror (4%), Guardian (4%) and Independent (1%) continuing to grow their US online audience in this period.

Overall, the most viewed news sites, for absolute visits and not year-over-year traffic are CNN (313 million visits a month), The New York Times (202.8 million), Yahoo News (198 million), Huffington Post (190.5 million), Fox News (167 million) and BuzzFeed (148.6 million).

By the end of 2015, online news and media sites remained a high performing industry in the US, accounting for 12.67% of all online activity in the US.

Joel Zand, SimilarWeb Digital Insights Manager, said: "U.S. audiences now spend more than a tenth of their time while online reading and sharing news stories. However the ability to generate year-over-year growth for publishers is extremely difficult in a challenging market with constant innovation and new players. While household names still dominate for sheer numbers, many publishers are achieving successful year-over-year growth by focusing on more niche topics and becoming a vital source of news and information among these audiences."

Jimmy Finkelstein, Chairman of The Hill said: "The Hill's tremendous growth is a testament to what we have always believed: serious journalism about government and politics works on the web. In fact, we expect this growth to substantially accelerate this month and the coming year."

Top YoY increase in combined desktop and mobile Web traffic

About SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb's market insights have become the way millions of businesses worldwide, including Google, eBay and Nike, and discover, deploy, and decide their online strategies. The solution has unparalleled breadth covering 80 million websites and 3 million apps worldwide. The most accurate global analytics in the world is collected through a vast data set involves crawlers collecting billions of data points each month, the largest and most diverse panel in the world comprised of over 200 million user devices; partnerships with Internet Service Providers around the world, and Direct measurement where companies directly share their analytics data.

SimilarWeb was recognized in 2015 as one of Europe's top 100 fastest growing companies by Red Herring, was selected by Wired Magazine as one of the hottest 100 start-ups in Europe, and was named by Business Insider as one of the 50 enterprise startups to bet your career on in 2016.

Media Contact:
Jonathan Marciano
PR Manager, SimilarWeb
jonathanm@similarweb.com

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SOURCE SimilarWeb