AP News by the numbers
* Based on external data from Similarweb
The AP News challenge: A mission for digital transformation
In early 2023, AP embarked on a bold journey to revamp its digital presence and modernize APNews.com. The challenge? Replatform and relaunch the site in less than six months with an updated user experience, catering to a global audience and enabling new revenue opportunities.
The AP has historically operated as a B2B news organization, driven primarily by subscriptions to its content feeds and services. However, the shifting digital landscape demanded a new direct-to-consumer approach, enabling AP to expand its audience reach and diversify its revenue streams.
This relaunch was a massive undertaking, but it delivered exactly what AP needed: a scalable platform to meet the demands of today’s media landscape while preparing us for the future.
The solution: Brightspot steps up
Brightspot answered the call through a scalable solution with a bold new front-end design. The collaboration focused on seamless API integration with AP’s content feed, robust scalability to accommodate AP News global traffic and an aggressive timeline to relaunch the site by the end of June 2023.
“What we valued in the Brightspot platform was not just the technology, but the partnership. Their team helped us deliver a completely new website in just six months — a very fast timeframe,” says Paul Simoneschi, AP’s VP of Consumer Product & Technology. “From building custom tools to fine-tuning platform stability, they truly understood the urgency and scale of our needs.”
With Brightspot’s platform, AP was able to:
- increase their audience reach with real-time content available on APNews.com;
- drive engagement and reach with a suite of new features including live blogs and interactives;
- establish new monetization models;
- create optimized editorial workflows for a growing newsroom;
- establish a technology foundation for future innovation in content creation (including AI and personalization).
What we valued in the Brightspot platform was not just the technology, but the partnership. Their team helped us deliver a completely new website in just six months.
The result for AP News: A record-breaking experience
On deadline, APNews.com relaunched in June 2023 with its bold new design, aimed at capturing a bigger global audience. The site has since proved its capabilities by handling the intense demands of breaking news coverage like presidential assassination attempts, natural disasters, political upheavals and more.
During the U.S. elections in November 2024, APNews.com achieved record-breaking traffic: over 80 million page views on Election Day and some 89 million the following day based on data reported via Similarweb — a sustained surge that broke AP’s all-time traffic records. “We handled 1 million page views every five minutes at peak traffic, with zero stability issues,” Simoneschi notes. “That scale and reliability were crucial to our success.”
AP’s new live blog feature has played a key role in capturing audience attention — and driving dramatically more page views. Millions of readers rely on AP’s real-time updates during major events, with the live blog frequently ranking at the top of Google search results for breaking stories.
“We have seen great success in attracting more people to AP News. The new platform helped us implement a more robust SEO strategy across the site leading to meaningful increases in traffic sent from Google,” says Jason Hart, CMS lead for APNews.com. “Live blogging was another big win. The new platform's live blogging capabilities supported editorial's push for covering more events using live blogs. The flexibility and ease of use have enabled the team to run multiple live blogs a week, sometimes multiple live blogs a day attracting significant traffic.”
Custom features for a 24/7 news operation
One of the standout achievements of the collaboration was creating a workflow system that streamlines emerging news updates. Brightspot’s CMS intelligently merges updates from AP’s content feed with minimal editorial intervention.
The system is built to intelligently assess stories in the feed that have undergone few changes versus the ones that require additional editorial oversight. This feature allows AP News editors to focus on the stories that are in need of the necessary editorial workflow checks. With time freed to curate appropriate sections of the site, they can also further enhance stories with multimedia elements like images and videos, which are key drivers of audience engagement and monetization.
“Brightspot’s automation around content updates has been a game changer,” Simoneschi says. “It saves our editorial team time while ensuring accuracy and efficiency in our coverage.”
Live blog growth: This feature was instrumental in helping AP dominate search results, delivering fresh content and millions of pageviews during key moments.
Hart affirms the benefits new publishing workflows have brought to the newsroom.“With hundreds of stories written a day, we need a way to make sure the stories display on the correct section and hub pages or the right modules on the homepage,” he says. “Flexible ingestion rules enable us to route stories to the right places without an editor needing to manually manage things.”
Flexibility extends to being able to create variations and user-experiences based on the day’s news.
“We have more flexibility and options to quickly update the layout of our site,” says Hart. “More options for managing which headlines appear where on the site. Before we had limited dynamic feeds. With Brightspot we are able to have more complex dynamic feeds to pull in the articles we want.”
The site also integrates custom applications to extend AP News’ immersive storytelling. Available as enhancements in standard article-based stories or standalone projects, the most notable application includes interactive maps and infographics that render seamlessly on APNews.com to report live elections results and updates. These interactives provide real-time reporting and data to millions of users while maintaining AP’s brand consistency and supporting advertising monetization opportunities.
Looking ahead
AP’s new platform isn’t just a tool — it’s a foundation for ongoing innovation. Features like enhanced SEO, flexible content curation (including innovation around AI) and personalized content experiences will continue to support AP’s digital transformation. The AP News team has since launched new native iOS and Android apps to further build audience engagement and loyalty on those platforms.
As Simoneschi summarizes: “This relaunch was a massive undertaking, but it delivered exactly what AP needed: a scalable platform to meet the demands of today’s media landscape while preparing us for the future.”
The reinvention of APNews.com marks the start of a new era for one of the world’s most iconic news organizations, powered by the flexibility and expertise of the Brightspot platform. With a foundation that combines cutting-edge technology with a deep understanding of editorial needs, AP is positioned to thrive in the fast-changing world of digital journalism.
During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, APNews.com achieved unprecedented traffic growth, cementing its role as a leading source of election news. Over Election Day and the following day, the site attracted 48 million visits, representing a 247% increase compared to the 2020 election based on data reported via Similarweb. Sustained traffic levels continued for nearly two weeks after Election Day.
Innovative features driving engagement
Key to this success was AP’s live coverage through its blog, which dominated Google search rankings for breaking news and captured millions of pageviews. “That’s traffic we got in 2024 that we wouldn't have had on our old platform without that feature,” says Sean McCorkle, Director of Product Development and Growth.
During the 2024 election cycle, the new platform enabled AP to provide real-time updates and enhance audience engagement through curated content and interactive elements such as maps and infographics.
“The other new thing that we built into the Brightspot platform is the ability to show our interactives and highly stylized graphics, particularly on election maps,” McCorkle notes. “What led to that record traffic was all the traffic we had on the election maps. So that was a big win for us.”
As it relates to AP News’ successful election coverage in 2024, Hart recalls that the website’s record-breaking success was no fluke.
“Election coverage is one of the AP's primary strengths, especially during presidential elections,” he says. “The AP called over 5,000 races in 2024, so there was a lot of information to get out to our site visitors. The new platform was able to support an API to publish race calls from the Election team to the live blog directly. This was faster and more accurate than we could have otherwise.”
Unwavering stability amid cyber threats
David Habib, Brightspot’s Chief Information Officer, emphasized, “Our security protocols, combined with the collaborative efforts of global security teams, ensured that the AP’s platform remained robust and stable during one of the most critical nights of the year.”
AP’s Paul Simoneschi affirms the value of the intense preparation and collaboration across teams. "For the election, Brightspot’s team worked closely with us to prepare the platform, and we had no infrastructure issues, even with record-breaking traffic over multiple days,” he said, continuing, "Brightspot wasn’t just a vendor — they were in the trenches with us, ensuring everything went smoothly during critical moments like the election."
AP News in brief
