Fox News Digital delivered a record year in 2019, setting new highs across foxnews.com multi-platform views, unique visitors, minutes, and mobile app unique visitors, according to Comscore.
Driving more than 19 billion multi-platform views for the year, up 12 percent from 2018, Fox News Digital Network saw the largest year-over-year growth in multi-platform views, with the majority of brands in the news competitive set experiencing a decrease year-over-year. Monthly multi-platform unique visitors across FOX News Digital averaged 101 million unique visitors this year, an 11 percent increase versus 2018, beating CNN.com in growth year over year.
In multi-platform minutes, FOX News Digital earned the number one spot in the news competitive set, driving 46.6 billion minutes, up 35 percent versus the prior year, and experiencing the largest year over year growth. FOX News Digital finished at number one in the news competitive set, outpacing CNN.com (18.6 billion/36 billion minutes), NYTimes.com (13.3 billion/13.2 billion minutes), and WashingtonPost.com (6.1 billion/14 billion minutes) in total views and total minutes.
In commenting on the year’s performance, FOX News Digital Editor-In-Chief Porter Berry said, “Our enterprise reporting propelled FOX News Digital to its best year ever, averaging over 100 million monthly unique views for the first time in history and a second consecutive year as the leader in multi-platform minutes. I am beyond proud of our dedicated team of journalists who consistently produce compelling and informative content across all our digital platforms, and look forward to continued success in the year ahead.”
The month of December 2019 also saw FOX News Digital deliver 3.5 billion multi-platform minutes, beating CNN.com for the 15th consecutive month. The strong performance also helped drive the FOX News Mobile App ahead of the CNN Mobile App for the 13th month in a row in unique visitors (7.4 million versus 6.8 million).
For the 64th consecutive month, FOX News remained the number one most engaged news brand on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) as well as the most engaged news brand in the world for all of 2019 (Jan-Dec) and FOX Business closed out 2019 as the number one most engaged business news brand on Facebook in the world, according to Shareablee.
Both FOX News and FOX Business earned the number one spot in Facebook interactions among all news brands and all business news brands, respectively in calendar year 2019. On both platforms’ combined (Facebook and Instagram) FOX News interactions were up 11 percent versus last year. FOX News also earned the number one spot in YouTube views this year, driving 1.4 billion total video views, up 141 percent and doubling last year’s views, more than any other news brand in the main competitive set, according to Shareablee. With Facebook Live, both FOX News and FOX Business placed number one in video views among the main news competitive set and the business TV news competitive set (910 million and 157 million views, respectively), according to Crowdtangle data.
Following FOX Business’ brand refresh earlier this year, FOXBusiness.com’s multi-platform total views increased 40 percent compared to the same period last year and experienced 880 million total views in calendar year 2019. FOXBusiness.com also saw a record year of average monthly multi-platform unique visitors with about 15.8 million per month a 27 percent increase versus the prior year, and drove 1.5 billion total minutes in 2019 up 90% from total minutes in calendar year 2018.
In December, FOX Business was number one in year-over-year growth in multi-platform unique visitors and in multi-platform minutes among the business news competitive set, while most of the competition saw a decrease in unique views year over year, and experienced its highest month to date for unique visitors, with 20.8 million, up 67% versus the prior year. December also recorded 176 million multi-platform total minutes, its highest month ever, and up 160% versus the prior year.