'Traffic tailspin': Far-right websites see as much as 95% decline in visitors in 4 years

27.06.2024 00:06

Raw Story

The biggest conservative news outlets are seeing a precipitous decline in traffic to their websites, and it's showing no sign of abating despite 2024 being a high-profile election season.

On Wednesday, traffic data compiled by media analyst Howard Polskin's website TheRighting.com, which specializes in tracking conservative media, shared a table showing the number of unique visitors (individual internet users who visit a website) a site received in May of 2020 compared to May of 2024, along with a percentage difference in the subsequent column.

Polskin found that high-profile far-right websites like Breitbart, Daily Wire, The Blaze, National Review, Daily Caller and the Federalist all saw sharp drops in unique visitors between the 2020 election cycle and the 2024 cycle.

Breitbart — which was led by Steve Bannon before he joined former President Donald Trump's campaign and administration — saw its unique visitors drop from more than 5 million in 2020 to just over 500,000 last month – a 90% drop. The Federalist, which was co-founded by Meghan McCain's husband, Ben Domenech, saw its unique user count plummet from 3.3 million to 166,000, which is a 95% decline.

Along with being an election year, 2020 was during the midst of the Covid pandemic, which saw increases in traffic to many news sites.

But the drop has been precipitous, onlookers said.

While traffic to other, larger mainstream outlets is also down, the rapid cratering of unique user numbers is mostly concentrated among right-wing media. Baragona pointing out that mainstream media sources have not fared nearly as poorly as their conservative counterparts.

"Even compared to last year, most of the top right-wing media outlets have seen a traffic tailspin. Year over year, the Washington Examiner is down 72%, Outkick has dropped 46% and The Federalist has lost 79% of its audience," Baragona tweeted.

"Meanwhile, compared to May 2023, the NYT is up 10%."

One culprit of this traffic decline could be due to Facebook adjusting its algorithm – which is the code that dictates what users see in their respective news feeds — in recent years. In April, Polskin noted that traffic for pro-Trump sites was down by roughly 40% over the past four years, which lines up with Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of changes to the algorithm. In 2018, Zuckerberg announced the feed would begin prioritizing content from users' friends and family over more overtly political content from pages.

Following the changes to the Facebook algorithm, publishers like Dan Bongino, Franklin Graham and Daily Wire, which used to frequently top the social media platform's engagement lists, saw significant drops in likes, comments and shares on their content.

"The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing," Atlantic contributor Paul Farhi wrote at the time.

However, this problem may not be confined to news outlets. Baragona observed that Trump's Truth Social platform also saw a significant decline in unique users. In May of 2024, Truth Social had just 2.7 million unique users, which is a 14% drop compared to May of 2023. This marked the platform's second-worst performing month since its launch.