Another year in the books for Mediaite means another post recapping our traffic growth. We are incredibly proud to report that in a time when digital media outlets are by and large struggling to build their audiences, thanks to some pernicious forces battering the industry (ahem, Google, Facebook), Mediaite saw its readership grow exponentially in 2023.
Here’s the headline: we saw our biggest audience ever in 2023. Our total traffic for the year clocked in at 701 million pageviews.
That’s a 66 percent surge from our previous record of 422 million, which was set in 2022. In multiple months last year, we topped 75 million pageviews.
Of course, 2023 was a massive year for news on the media beat.
There was Dominion’s defamation case against Fox News, which started with a series of bombshell revelations uncovered during discovery and ended in a devastating $787.5 million settlement.
Days later, on an otherwise quiet Monday morning, both Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon were fired by their respective cable news networks. Lemon has mostly laid low since his ouster, but Carlson
CNN made headlines all year with its own internal troubles, which included a poorly executed Trump town hall and severe ratings woes. Chris Licht, its top executive, was fired in June after just 13 months on the job.
But what’s so promising about our performance is that our biggest traffic often didn’t come from the biggest stories, making for an audience diversification that is even more encouraging for the future.
I want to extend a major congrats and heartfelt thanks to the small but nimble editorial team here at Mediaite. I’d also like to extend a thank you to our readers, old and new, obsessive and casual, for continuing to read our coverage on media and politics for the fifteenth year running. We are looking forward to an even bigger 2024.