NBCU News Group’s digital properties reached 147 million unique visitors
NBC News released a new #1 podcast and an accompanying documentary – Southlake
Best listener month on record and top 10 podcast publisher
September 16, 2021 – NBCU News Group (NBC News, TODAY, MSNBC and CNBC) brought in 147 million unique visitors in August, ranking as the #1 news organization in the U.S., beating CNN, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, New York Times and Washington Post for a fifth straight month. NBCU News Group was also #1 in total video minutes watched and total video starts in the month of July, with over 400 million views and 1.8 billion minutes watched.
CNBC Digital, which continues to rank in the top three Business News properties for unique visitors for the past 15 consecutive months, ranked as the #1 non-portal brand in video minutes and views and #1 brand in video viewers within the category (July 2021), with more than 16 million unique video viewers, holding that #1 spot for seven consecutive months.
MSNBC ranked within the top five entities in the Political News Category for a fifth straight month for unique visitors and ranked as the #1 brand for video minutes, views and viewers within the Political News category in July. MSNBC Daily has reached record-setting traffic for the past four months after launching in October.
TODAY Digital has reached more than 50M unique visitors for nine of the last ten months. TODAY also continues to rank among the top 10 entities in the Lifestyle category for video views and minutes and ranks among the top 5 entities for video viewers (July 2021).
NBCU News Group’s streaming services, TODAY All Day and NBC News NOW, had top months, with NBC News NOW seeing 65 million video views and 20 million hours watched, up +147% year-to-date in 2021 over the same time frame in 2020. It was the streaming platform’s best August ever, with viewers on average watching for nearly an hour at a time on OTT platforms.
TODAY All Day saw one of the best months on record in August and launched on a new platform, Samsung TV. The past three months have been the streaming channel’s strongest months to-date after launching last summer.
NBC News premiered a digital original documentary, Southlake: Racial Reckoning in a Texas Suburb, which tells the story of a Southlake, Texas father running for a school board seat on a shoe-string budget, a 56-year old Black mom of three fighting to keep her kids and others safe in school and a Black senior reconciling her years at the school while using her voice as the school board decides the fate of its racial diversity plan. Viewers can watch the documentary now on NBCNews.com and Peacock.
CNBC premiered a digital original documentary, A Race Against COVID-19, that tells the behind-the-scenes story of how Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech developed vaccines in record time. The hour-long program features interviews with leaders and top scientists from Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech who describe their experience of having a hand in one of the greatest medical races in history. Viewers can watch the documentary on CNBC.com.
CNBC Make It launched Relocated, a new video series looking at digital nomads who have left the United States to live in other countries.
August was the News Group’s best listener month on record, continuing to rank in the top ten of all podcast publishers, with 48 million downloads across all podcasts and showcasts and overall audience up +16% versus August 2020.
TODAY podcasts had one of their three best months ever, up +21% vs. August 2020. Meanwhile, MSNBC podcasts had their second best month this year, with more than 15 million downloads, up +13% versus its prior three month average.
NBC News released their newest original podcast, Southlake, which offers listeners a rare look inside a racial and cultural fight, intensified by national politics, that tore a wealthy Texas suburb apart. The podcast quickly ranked as the #1 podcast on the Apple podcast charts and has reached more than 2 million downloads since launch. Available wherever you get your podcasts, audiences can listen to episodes one through four (out now) and subscribe to stay up to date when new episodes are released. Learn more at NBCNews.com/Southlake.
*Sources: Comscore Media Metrix (August 2021) & Comscore Video Metrix (July 2021), U.S. desktop internet population 2+ and mobile internet population 13+ years old, Custom-Defined List, Based on NBCU News entity compared to a custom list of brand competitors that are also in the News/Information Category. Adobe Analytics & Partner Dashboards, Cross-Platform Global Data, August 2021. Podtrac, Total Mobile and Desktop US Audience and Global Downloads, August 2021.
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For more information, contact:
Emily Passer
NBC News Digital
Emily.Passer@nbcuni.com
Claudia Meyer-Samargia
NBC News Digital
Claudia.MeyerSamargia@nbcuni.com
