Colorado's Most Popular TV Stations Online

Traditional local-television news viewership is declining at stations across the country, including in Denver. But every month, thousands upon thousands of Coloradans catch news stories or entire broadcasts online, making the popularity of an outlet's website just as important as the number of people who tune in the old-fashioned way, if not more so.

Two of the most popular Colorado TV news websites each collected more than five million views in September. And the list of the top ten outlets demonstrates the power of websites in the Colorado Springs market as well as stations that cater to Spanish-language speakers.

The numbers come from Muck Rack, a service that provides information to public-relations professionals about where to target their pitches; Muck Rack uses data from the analytics site SimilarWeb, which puts audiences into national and global perspective on their respective pages. But while SimilarWeb's most recent shared statistics date back to August, Muck Rack's numbers are updated through the end of September. And there are other discrepancies. Muck Rack's top ten rankings for Colorado are led by CBS4Denver, but the station's web address isn't in the SimilarWeb system, and the nearly 52 million views total listed for it by Muck Rack actually corresponds to cbsnews.com, the national network of which the Denver facility is an affiliate. In addition, Muck Rack mistakenly omits Denver7, whose web visits in August put it in sixth place overall.

Still, other Muck Rack findings correspond to SimilarWeb's data, and reveal that online viewership follows at least one historical trend that predates the worldwide web: The number of people who follow the news goes down in the summertime and rises as the weather cools. For example, the total online views for 9News in August came to around 5.6 million but rose to nearly 5.8 million in September. Close behind were partner stations Fox31 and KWGN/Channel 2, whose combined sum hit 4.7 million in August, but jumped over 5.3 million in September.

This phenomenon is consistent for all but one station on the list, which includes three broadcasters from Colorado Springs and one from Pueblo, plus the Denver-area purveyors of Telemundo and Univision, whose online audiences range from 200,000-500,000.

Here are the ten most popular Colorado television stations online, in descending order, as measured by views in August and September, including rankings globally and nationally as of August and where they landed that month in the category of arts and entertainment/online streaming TV; 9News, which led the local stations, was the 56th-most-viewed site in the U.S. under that definition. Click each link for additional details from SimilarWeb.

1. 9News (Denver)
August views: 5.6 million
September views: 5,782,737
Global rank: 12,981
Country rank: 2,473
Category rank: 56

2-3. Fox31/KWGN (Denver)
August views: 4.7 million
September views: 5,364,578
Global rank: 18,741
Country rank: 2,314
Category rank: 92

4. KKTV (Colorado Springs)
August views: 2.7 million
September views: 2,924,325
Global rank: 31,666
Country rank: 1,072
Category rank: 200

5. KRDO (Colorado Springs)
August views: 1.5 million
September views: 1,410,393
Global rank: 56,530
Country rank: 10,591
Category rank: 374

6. KMGH/Denver 7 (Denver)
August views: 1.5 million
September views: N/A
Global rank: 56,851
Country rank: 11,428
Category rank: 403

7. KOAA (Pueblo)
August views: 395.9K
September views: 701,686
Global rank: 171,559
Country rank: 32,265
Category rank: 950

8. KDEN/Telemundo (Aurora)
August views: 257.7K
September views: 502,706
Global rank: 185,705
Country rank: 33,125
Category rank: 1,949

9. Fox21 (Colorado Springs)
August views: 392K
September views: 395,451
Global rank: 153,977
Country rank: 28,096
Category rank: 859

10. KCEC/Univision Colorado (Denver)
August views: N/A
September views: 230,943
Global rank: N/A
Country rank: N/A
Category rank: N/A