The Hill blows past Washington rivals Politico in web traffic (original) (raw)

The race for the White House is heating up — and not just for the candidates.

The Hill, the inside-the-beltway news organization, is claiming its Web traffic has, in a first, surpassed that of rival Politico.

“We were up 173 percent [year-on-year] in December and beat [Politico] for the first time,” James Finkelstein, chief executive of The Hill, told our Keith J. Kelly. The Hill drew 10,577,000 unique visitors in December, according to comScore, compared to the 8,515,000 uniques for Politico, Finkelstein said.

A spokesman for Politico huffed that its own internal numbers put its traffic for the month at about 11 million, which would keep it ahead of The Hill.

Not to let a good “he-said-he said” opportunity go by without trying to amp it up a little, we reached out to Finkelstein to see if his internal numbers were over 11 million. He responded: “They’re being completely disingenuous. ComScore is the standard, and our internal numbers are 13 million.

Meanwhile, CrowdTangle, the social analytics company, named The Hill as one of the 15 biggest Facebook news pages in total interactions in 2015.