The Hill website homepage on morning of 27 January 2026
The Hill has “fortified” its breaking news team to make the most of a “bonkers” news cycle in US politics.
The US political news site recorded 1.24 billion page views across 2025, up 7% compared to 2024, according to Comscore.
Meanwhile its average monthly reach (excluding social and Youtube) in Q4 2025 was up 14% year on year to 33.4 million unique visitors. Including social and Youtube, its total average monthly reach was 39 million, the Comscore data said.
The Bill stands in a field where most of the top 50 US news websites are losing traffic year on year , hit by the impact of falling Google referral traffic .
This made The Hill the largest dedicated US political news website for average monthly uniques, visits, and page views in Q4 per Comscore. Politico had 26.9 million average monthly unique visitors (up 9% year on year) while Axios was on 22.3 million (down 10%).
According to Similarweb data, The Hill grew 42% year on year to 40.5 million visits in December .
Bill Sammon, senior vice president of editorial content at The Hill, told Press Gazette of the growth: “It is obviously a very busy news period, but it also has to do with how you handle that.
“And one of the things that we’ve done at The Hill is there is so much coming out of Washington right now, whether it’s Congress, the White House, the courts, the Pentagon, that we made a strategic decision towards the latter part of last year to really shore up and fortify our breaking news team.”
He said at one point last year The Hill had just two breaking news reporters (alongside dozens of other journalists) and they are now up to a “full contingent” of seven.
Sammon described them as the “frontline” when “you’ve got six fire hoses coming at you”.
He added that they sit alongside “beat reporters that are digging more deeply” and “senior writers who take an even deeper look” at questions like: “How is the presidential election shaping up? Does it look like we’re going to have a government shutdown? What are the midterms going to be like?”
Sammon noted: “The thing that’s most important to me is maintaining that non-partisan brand that we have. We’re there to give you the news.
“I think people really, especially in this day and age, are looking for a place where they can just get a first clean cut at ‘what happened today? Maybe I’ll have time to get everybody’s hot take later, but right now I just don’t have that much time. I need to know what happened in a relatively straightforward way without it being slanted to one side or the other.’”
The Hill was ‘good place to start’ for govt shutdown information
Sammon gave the example of the longest-ever US government shutdown throughout October and into November, which led to huge traffic spikes for The Hill .
According to Comscore, October drew The Hill’s biggest audience since July 2024 with 43 million unique visitors.
And the site saw the biggest month-on-month growth in visits in Press Gazette’s ranking (which uses Similarweb data) of the top 50 news websites in the US in October, up 45%.
Sammon said: “Journalistically that’s in our wheelhouse. If you’re thinking about a government shutdown and you’re like ‘okay, well, where do I learn something about it?’ The Hill’s a pretty good place to start. So we got a ton of traffic from that.”
But he added that they were not reliant on this one topic for traffic. “It’s consistently across a broad range of topics, whether it’s the agencies, the White House, the House Senate, the mid-terms, the presidential [election], all of the breaking news in Minneapolis, the foreign policy – there’s so much foreign policy news with Greenland and Venezuela and Iran and all the other.
“It’s been reassuring to me to see that as I look at the traffic and look at what people are gravitating towards, it’s really all of the above.”
Across the past two years, 59% of global visits to The Hill were classed as direct traffic (with 25% from organic search) according to Similarweb.
But The Hill’s social audience has also more than doubled year on year, according to Comscore.
The Hill ‘blessed to ride the wave’ of ‘bonkers’ news cycle
Sammon, a former White House correspondent for multiple newspapers and managing editor and senior vice president of Fox News, spoke about the “sheer pace” of the current news cycle and the fact it has not slowed down since the first 100 days of Trump’s second presidency.
“When you have that much news happening, there’s a value on the need to have people who can intelligently chronicle it, make sense of it,” he said.
“There’s always going to be a need for storytellers, responsible journalistic storytellers that can get the facts right, can bring it to you with a certain level of responsibility and fairness.
“So with that, I take great comfort in the fact that this news cycle is bonkers because in a time when so many news organisations are seeing their numbers shrink… it’s encouraging to see some success stories, and I think we count ourselves among those success stories.
“We’re very blessed to be able to ride that wave and provide a valuable service to the American public. That is good journalism, but also results in a successful business. Because if you don’t have a successful business, you don’t get to put out good journalism.”
The Hill has been part of Nexstar, primarily a TV company including national cable network News Nation and hundreds of local affiliates, since 2021 when it was acquired for $130m,. Sammon said this means they have “an unusual concentration of journalistic firepower in one space” and can leverage each other’s reach.
The Hill primarily brings in revenue through advertising. Sammon said: “As our readership has grown, the company’s gotten more healthy financially and we’re super excited. We think 2026 is going to be even better than 2025,” he added, citing the upcoming midterm elections and then the switch to focus on early moves in the next presidential campaign.
“If you can’t make a successful journalism model out of that, I don’t know, you might want to try another line of work.”
The Hill making print more regular and expanding tech coverage
The Hill targets both policymakers and the general public. Sammon said its stories are “written for a general audience” rather than “like a technical paper or something that an ordinary person couldn’t understand”.
But many policymakers also read The Hill and Sammon noted they “obviously have a lot of inside information at their fingertips by virtue of their jobs, but they don’t have all the information. They have the part that pertains to them.”
The Hill prints a free newspaper that Sammon said is stepping up from anywhere between one to three times a week to a regular schedule of being put out every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday so “people can count on it. People can expect it.”
The newspaper is distributed on the desks of all 535 members of Congress as well as in other parts of the government, the White House and federal agencies, and via strategically-placed free boxes in Washington DC.
Sammon said there are also plans to beef up tech coverage this year as they try to anticipate what will be the biggest policy issues.
The brand is currently advertising for roles including assistant editor, White House reporter, national politics reporter, cryptocurrency and finance policy reporter, senior technology reporter, audience engagement producer, Youtube manager, and producers for its video content.
Otherwise, this year, Sammon said they are concentrating on “making sure we have a lean, mean journalistic machine to be responsive to the readers’ desires, so that we can provide the best product possible to them”.
Email [email protected] to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our “Letters Page” blog