The last time we looked at Montana news/blog rankings was June 25.
At that time, the top 5 news sites in the state were:
- Bozeman Daily Chronicle
- Billings Gazette
- Missoulian
- GF Trib
- Helena IR
And in June, the top 5 blogs were:
- Missoula Current
- MT Post
- Big Sky Words
- Last Best News
- MT Cowgirl
Today we’ll look at the most recent rankings.
We get this information using the website traffic estimator site, Alexa.
Here are the 20 most visited sites in Montana news and politics, with their US rank listed (sometimes global if traffic is too low):
- Billings Gazette: #10,943
- Missoulian: #17,365
- Helena IR: #24,922
- Bozeman Daily Chronicle: #26,710
- GF Trib: #41,556
- MT Standard: #41,803
- KPAX: #47,676
- NBC Montana: #50,639
- Flathead Beacon: #57,949
- Ravalli Republic: #63,732
- Missoula Current: #147,303
- KFBB: #241,911
- Big Sky Words: #303,289
- MT Cowgirl: #315,632
- ID/MT Post: #320,916
- KXLH: #334,767
- Hungry Horse News: #2.4 million
- Reptile Dysfunction: #7.4 million
- Flathead Memo: #13.5 million
- Western Word: No Ranking
I added two new newspapers to the list this time: the Ravalli Republic and the Hungry Horse News.
I’ve also removed a few sites from the list.
The last time we checked, the Missoula Independent was the 10th most popular news site in Montana.
Now that site has been shut down.
Also three months ago, Last Best News was the 13th most popular news site in the state.
That site has also been shut down.
Montana Cowgirl hasn’t been shut down yet, but they haven’t put up anything new in over a month.
Still, the site has managed to increase its traffic from last time. Despite not posting for a long time, they’re getting more traffic than MT Post, which often puts up at least one story a day.
Here are some other takeaways:
- The Billings Gazette regained the top spot, becoming the most visited news site in the state. It’d lost this position to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle during the summer.
- Missoula’s KPAX is the most popular TV news site in the state.
- The Missoula Current is the most popular news blog in the state, yet their ranking is still nowhere close to what we see with the newspapers. Still, they gained about 20,000 ranks this quarter.
- Here at Big Sky Words I’ve managed to regain the top spot of the political blogs, narrowly beating out MT Cowgirl and MT Post. I did this by boosting my rank by 15,000 places.
- MT Post actually fell by 150,000 ranks, despite putting up lots of new content and getting lots of social shares. Just because someone likes your post on Facebook, it doesn’t mean they’re actually clicking back to your site, or even reading the post.
And that’s all I have for you today. Come back in December for the next installment of these rankings posts.
