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• Tax refunds will be bigger this year because of the big, beautiful bill » act, with higher-income households set to reap the biggest checks.
• Press Gazette’s monthly ranking of the top 50 news websites in the US, using Similarweb data.
• AP News (98.8 million, up 21%) and Variety (43.8 million, up 19%) also saw growth of over or close to a fifth.
• September saw the re-entry of The Atlantic into the top 50 (visits down 0.2% month-on-month but up 15.2% year-on-year to 22.9 million) after it dropped off in August.

But the picture is rosier over a longer timespan, with three-quarters of the top 50 publishers seeing year-on-year growth in visits in August. The two top ten sites to see year-on-year traffic declines were Fox News (down 0.7%) and Mail Online, where visits dropped 7.2%. New top ten entrant Forbes was also the fastest-growing site in the group, seeing visits rise 48% compared with September 2023.

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On the other end of the scale the fastest year-on-year traffic losses were seen by the Los Angeles Times (25.8 million, down 30% on October 2023), the Daily Mail (104.1 million, down 22.8%) and Fox News. The fastest-growing top-ten site month-on-month was USA Today, followed by aggregator Google News (122.4 million, up 8.6%) and People. At the start of October the site deployed a new paywall, which does not appear to have immediately hurt its web visits. CNN (425 million) remains the most-visited news site in the US despite an 11.8% year-on-year decrease in traffic — the only fall among the top ten besides Fox News (258.1 million), which lost 22.5% of its October 2023 traffic. Thirty websites in the top 50 also saw their visits grow year-on-year in October, as well as eight of the top ten.

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The biggest increases in traffic were at USA Today (34%), CNN (33%), Newsweek (21%), Fox News (20%) and The New York Times (15%). It nonetheless remained the most-visited news site in the US, a position it has held since Similarweb updated its Closing date for store data model in June and pushed the site ahead of The New York Times. It was followed by The Independent (down 12.4% month-on-month) and Business Insider (64.3 million, down 11.8%).