Hitwise Ranks Election Traffic To News Sites

Hitwise has released a ranking of some of the top news sites, measured by traffic on Election Day. CNN.com came out on top, seeing a 146 percent spike over the day before. But MSNBC.com, Fox News, and the Drudge report all saw nice bumps as well. ABCNews.com had a record day, with a 113 percent jump in traffic over the day before. And CNN’s Political Ticker blog by itself saw a 122 percent jump. (Twitter traffic rose 43 percent and traffic to Twitter Election 2008 rose 1,100 percent).

Some sites, amazingly saw declines from the day before, such as Time.com (-21%), Current TV(-53%), and Slate (-33%).

Here is a list of the top election news sites (you can see all the stats in the table below):

1.Yahoo News
2. CNN
3. MSNBC
4. Google News
5. FOXNews
6. Drudge Report
7. The New York Times
8. FOXNews.com Elections
9. USA Today
10. ABCnews.com
11. The Huffington Post
12. AOL News
13. Real Clear Politics
14. The Washington Post
15. CNN Political Ticker
16. CBSNews.com
17. Time
18. Electoral Vote Predictor
19. The Politico
20. MSN Election 09
21. Townhall.com
22. Free Republic
23. Daily Kos
24. Current TV
25. Slate
26. FiveThirtyEight
27. Michelle Malkin

Conspicuously missing from this list are the news sites provided by search engines Yahoo, Google and AOL. If these were included, Yahoo News would take the top spot above CNN with a 55% increase in traffic and 0.72% market share. Google News would take 4th place behind MSNBC with a 58% increase, and AOL News would come in at 12th place behind The Huffington Post with a mere 19% increase. Update: I’ve inserted those three in the rankings above)