Foxnews.com averages around 12 million or 13 million monthly unique users, according to Nielsen Online, rarely approaching the 35 million to 40 million uniques that leaders Yahoo News, MSNBC and CNN regularly deliver in aggregate. Some of that disparity can be explained away, as both Yahoo and MSNBC draw heavy traffic from their portal counterparts, and CNN benefits from traffic driven by CNNMoney.com and Sports Illustrated’s site.
But even on its own, CNN.com consistently beats Foxnews.com by 7 million or 8 million unique users. Per comScore, the gap is even larger: 43.4 million uniques for CNN.com in June vs. 11.4 million for Foxnews.com. Plus, CNN.com regularly bests Foxnews.com in measures like page views, time spent and video streams—and it has opened an early lead in mobile (14 million uniques vs. 9 million in May for Fox, per Nielsen).
This reinforces my theory that liberal radio and television shows lag in ratings because, unlike right wingers, liberals can read. But seriously, while a lot of folks over 65 are online, it’s fair to say that they are more educated, and thus more liberal, than Fox’s audience, for which the average age was 65 in 2009.
I’d hardly qualify CNN as liberal or even a worthwhile news source. At nearly any given time, their top news slots are replaced with things about reality TV, celebrities, talking points by the left and right wing. See the Tea Party — a tea party protest with 200 attendees will be front page, but a protest with 5,000 attendees will not be mentioned at all. They also give equal voice to voices that aren’t equal — they frequently allow pseudoscience a counter voice to modern progress as if ‘God saved my baby daughter! A miracle!!’ is equal to ‘Doctors use experimental procedure to save a newborn with deadly cancer’.
Lovely article and so true. Fox watchers are some of the most rabid, fearful and gullible people who are unfortunately as you say less likely to want the truth and honesty that is on other sites.