With Hurricane Sandy ravaging the East Coast, and the Obama-Romney election dominating national news attention, weather- and political-related websites saw big gains in traffic during October. That’s according to comScore’s Top 50 U.S. web properties list for the month.

Websites in comScore’s Political News category collectively reached an all-time high with 60 million visitors, a 30 percent gain over September. The top three sites in the category were

• HuffPost Politics: 15.4 million visitors (up 25 percent)
• CNN Politics: 13.5 million visitors (up 56 percent)
• NBCNews.com Politics: 11 million visitors (up 31 percent)

Other news/political sites like TheDailyBeast.com, Politico and ABC News were among the top gaining sites during October.

Hurricane Sandy is no doubt the reason why The Weather Channel jumped six spots to become the 18th most-visited site overall for the month. AccuWeather and Weather Underground aren’t in the Top 50, but they were both in the Top 10 gainers in October.

Here’s the overall Top 50 for October from comScore.

Fox News and The Washington Post also benefited from the election interest, as they rose 13 and 12 spots, respectively.

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Statistics: Market Share | Statistics: Popularity & Usage

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Marketing Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the US. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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