I compiled some traffic data (source: AHREFS) for 250+ of the most popular domains and compared the changes YoY.
Note: some of the biggest domains are missing, AHREFS would not let me download the data for Google, Youtube, Amazon and few other giants.
see also: Methodology
Winners – Best Progression YoY
Looking at which domain gained the most traffic year over year.
No matter how you look at the data, Reddit is the biggest winner of 2024. Their traffic exploded YoY, and they’re all over the SERPs.
As sudden as it seems, users’ interest in Reddit has been growing since forever, and Google only started to promote them A LOT to adapt its results to users’ expectations.
Winners – Top 30 traffic (2023 vs. 2024)
Reddit.com absolutely blew up, jumping five spots to the top of the list! It crushed the top four from last year.
Forbes also made some gains despite the huge drawbacks for Advisor.
Read also: Websites we’ve lost in 2024 – Forbes Advisor
I’m really curious why the MLB and NBA sites shot up so much this year. I will definitely dig more into that.
Losing Domains
Here are the domains that lost the most traffic YoY.
In the NSFW universe, I guess xnxx losing so much traffic played a role in the rise of xvideos and pornhub. Also wondering if AHREFS is monitoring a good enough sample for adult websites? I’m on the edge of removing them entirely from my future reports, it’s not like I will do a technical audit of them anyways.
Looking at the parent companies, the most represented in the flop 20 are:
- Valnet with 3 properties: collider.com, makeuseof.com and movieweb.com (-125M less visits YoY for the 3 domains, -113M total, -21% YoY)
- and Dotdash Meredith with 4: thespruce.com, byrdie.com, simplyrecipes.com and thespruceeats.com (for a total of -86M YoY, but their total is +8% YoY with a net positive of 162M visits thanks to allrecipes.com)
Other notable websites already mentioned in the 2024 SEO Necrology: bobvila.com and makeuseof.com
Publisher Breakdown
I tried my best to regroup the domains by their parent companies.
I didn’t account for acquisitions and a website’s traffic is attributed to its current owner.
For example, CNET’s traffic will be attributed to Ziff Davis, even though it was owned by Red Ventures in 2023.
Here are the top publishers in estimated traffic for 2024.
It’s pretty clear that Google didn’t favor content farms publishers this past year.
Only Dotdash Meredith seems to have won, but even then, if you remove Allrecipes.com from the equation, they’re down 20%.
A true winner is Future PLC who shows some real YoY growth for its top brands: Techradar (+63% YoY), TomsGuide (+20% YoY) and Space.com (+29% YoY)
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