Will news publishers see another ‘Trump bump’ in Trump’s second term?

Trump’s presidency coincided with a period when news publishers were focused on developing their subscription businesses. And publishers recorded growth. Companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post saw traffic surges and direct reader revenue upticks when Trump became president in 2016.

Now that he’s won the presidency again, what does a second Trump administration mean for news publishers?

In some ways, it’s too early to tell. Comscore can only pull monthly digital data, and numbers from this week won’t be available until December, a spokesperson told Digiday. Similarweb doesn’t have realtime data capabilities either and Election Day data wasn’t readily available by presstime.

In a mix of emails, op-eds and memos from top editors, publishers like The Atlantic, The Economist, Vox and HuffPost asked readers to subscribe or donate money to support their journalism amid a second Trump presidency. (Endorsing presidential candidates did lead to a boost in subscriber conversions and donations at The Economist, among other publishers. An Economist spokesperson said the day the publisher announced its endorsement of presidential candidate Kamala Harris was its biggest surge in new daily subscribers since January.

But there are some signs that this go-around will be different. And that may be due in large part to the different channels where people are getting their news.

Of the top 100 news and media sites, total U.S. traffic was about 4.6% lower in the week leading up to the 2024 election compared with the 2020 election, according to David Carr, editor of insights, news and research at Similarweb.

On an aggregate basis, traffic also picked up more during the last week of the 2020 race, increasing 6.9%, compared with just 3% this year.

Of the top 20 news publishers in the U.S., including The New York Times and USA Today, all but one saw week-over-week growth leading up to the election. The Washington Post was the only publisher to have a dip in traffic, falling 0.9% to 3.6 million unique visitors on Nov. 4 (Similarweb’s most recent data).

NBC News experienced the most week-to-week growth, jumping 25.6% from Oct. 27 with 3.6 million site visits on Nov., up from 2.7 million site visits. This was followed by CBS News, which saw a 24.6% growth in traffic during that week, and AP News, which grew 23.9%.

Of the top two dozen news publishers on YouTube (ranging from Fox News to Vox), total views to their channels on the platform were lower on both Election Day and the day after the election this year compared to the same election and post-election days in 2020, according to Tubular Labs data shared with Digiday.

On Nov. 5, the news publishers received a total of 152 million total views, down from 315 million on Nov. 3, 2020. And on Nov. 6, those channels received a total of 131 million views, down from 154 million on Nov. 4, 2020. 

That was still more than Election and post-Election Day views in 2016, when publishers’ social video strategies were less developed. After 2016, U.S. TV networks invested in social video, with features like live stream feeds on YouTube, a Tubular spokesperson noted.

One reason for the dip from 2020 to 2024 may be the growth of individual creators on YouTube over the past eight years. Year-over-year, the share of U.S. news & politics video views generated by media publishers shrank from 22.3% to 20.2%, a Tubular Labs spokesperson said. Meanwhile, individual creators rose from 71.8% to 74.2% of U.S. news & political views.

On election night this year, media publishers jumped to take 66.3% of total views, but creators still accounted for 32.6%, they added.

“Ultimately, I think this is largely a result of the bifurcation of how users consume news content, with more users looking to audio and video formats rather than going to a news website,” said Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of audience development and marketing firm Twenty-First Digital.

TikTok users have grown substantially in the last four years in the U.S., for example, growing from around 60 million users in the U.S. in 2020 to over 150 million in 2024, Chowning noted. The Pew Research Center shared data in September that usage of TikTok as a source for news grew has more than doubled since 2020. It’s a trend the Reuters Institute for Journalism has been tracking in its annual Digital News Reports since it noted a large shift in this trend in 2018, too.

Michael Morley, a professor at FSU Law specializing in election law, agreed that voters are turning to alternate sources of information for election coverage on social media and podcasts, and away from more traditional news sources.

“Going forward, I think this means that news publishers have to lean into those platforms to distribute news content and not count on traffic as the output of those efforts but look to monetize the engagement and impressions on those channels directly to support the work,” Chowning said.

Another factor is that in 2020, the election wasn’t called for another four days after folks went to vote at the ballot box, leading to breathless news coverage that week. This year, many news and politics desks were preparing for a similar timeline, though it wasn’t ultimately the case.

This year, Fox News had a huge next-day bump, given the results of the election. The publisher had 13.8 million total views on YouTube on Nov. 5, jumping to 66.3 million by the next day (compared to just 18.3 million views on post-Election Day in 2020), according to Tubular Labs.

So what did that mean for editorial strategy at some newsrooms? A faster return to “normal” — at least, for now.

“Like many outlets, we were steeled for a long week, but we had story angles ready to go based on questions on readers’ minds in both cases and a nimble staff ready to dive in based on either outcome,” said Josh Awtry, svp of audience development at Newsweek. “About the only thing we did do after the quicker, more decisive victory was to let more of our reporters return to regular beats and schedules.”