The audience traction also stems from using Reddit as a central hub for its distribution strategy.
Since September 2023, when Google unveiled its Helpful Content Update, Reddit has risen dramatically in search engine visibility. By organically seeding links to its reporting in popular Reddit forums, such as r/politics, Newsweek has seen a traffic windfall.
In December 2024, for instance, the publisher saw nearly 20% of its overall traffic come from Reddit alone, according to data from Similarweb. Most publishers expect to generate a single-digit percentage of their total traffic from the platform if any at all.
The 300-person company has also introduced several on-site features designed to encourage reader engagement and time spent.
A partnership with Google AI unveiled in October yielded an improved recommendation algorithm, suggesting related articles to readers that were responsible for between 300,000 and 500,000 incremental page views per day in November, according to Pragad.
Similarly, the publisher has taken pains to feature reader comments prominently across the home page—roughly 10,000 are posted daily, according to senior vice president of audience development Josh Awtry—to encourage its audience to invest themselves in Newsweek reporting.
In October 2023, it also began attaching a Fairness Meter to its stories, inviting readers to evaluate the bias they perceived in its reporting.
Since its debut, readers have submitted more than 3.5 million votes, with 70% of them rating articles as fair, according to Awtry. This tool, along with other features like The Daily Debate, helps to underscore the centrist approach Newsweek has taken to its reporting.
“The page-view generation is really interesting—and hard to determine why it’s so successful,” Shah said. “It suggests that the peripheral aspects—recommendations, fairness, comments—are features that are resonating.”
Past legal controversy
Alongside driving growth, Newsweek has had to contend with navigating its own series of internal criminal scandals.
The troubles stem from Newsweek’s former owner, International Business Times, which acquired Newsweek in 2013. In January 2018, IBT founder Etienne Uzac became the subject of a money-laundering investigation that involved Olivet University, an American college, and The Community, a church once accused of being a cult.