By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-21 · Originally reported by Tina Dupuy on FishbowlLA, 2010
For years the conventional wisdom held that the old entertainment trades had been left behind online. In August 2010, a set of traffic numbers complicated that story.
Then
In the summer of 2010, The Hollywood Reporter — long dismissed as the slower, stodgier of the entertainment trades — posted a digital milestone. THR.com drew more than 1.9 million unique visitors in July, according to comScore’s Media Metrix.
That figure put it ahead of every direct competitor FishbowlLA was tracking. Deadline Hollywood, the insurgent that had reshaped the beat, recorded about 1.18 million uniques the same month. THR’s number was roughly four times the traffic of its oldest rival, Variety, and about five times that of the newer entrant TheWrap.
The result landed in the middle of THR’s high-stakes reinvention — a costly bet on a glossy weekly print magazine and an expanded digital operation — and offered early evidence that the bet might be working.
Now
The traffic race that looked so decisive in 2010 turned out to be only an opening lap. Deadline, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter spent the next decade trading positions as audiences shifted to social platforms, search and aggregators, and the monthly unique-visitor count became a far less meaningful scoreboard than it had seemed.
The bigger surprise was consolidation. Penske Media bought Variety in late 2012, and by the early 2020s a PMC-led joint venture had drawn The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard under the same ownership umbrella as Deadline and Variety. The outlets measuring themselves against one another in this report largely ended up as corporate siblings.
What endures from the August 2010 snapshot is the reminder that THR’s print-and-digital gamble, widely doubted at the time, produced at least one clear early win.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.