XPost: sac.politics, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   From: NoBody@nowhere.com   
      
   Right-Wing Media Are in Trouble   
      
      
      
   The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters   
   isn’t just slowing; it’s utterly collapsing.   
   By Paul Farhi   
      
   April 13, 2024   
      
   As you may have heard, mainstream news organizations are facing a financial   
   crisis. Many liberal publications have taken an even more severe beating.   
   But the most dramatic declines over the past few years belong to   
   conservative and right-wing sites. 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.   
      
   This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was   
   down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The   
   Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the   
   Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media. (February is the   
   most recent month with available Comscore data.) Some of the bigger names   
   in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57   
   percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative   
   aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a   
   decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent. (The site’s CEO and co-founder,   
   Sean Davis, called that figure “laughably inaccurate” in an email but   
   offered no further explanation.) FoxNews.com, by far the most popular   
   conservative-news site, has fared better, losing “only” 22 percent of   
   traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors   
   compared with four years ago.   
      
   Enjoy a year of unlimited access to The Atlantic—including every story on   
   our site and app, subscriber newsletters, and more.   
   Become a Subscriber   
      
   Some amount of the decline over that period was probably inevitable, given   
   that 2020 was one of the most intense and newsiest years in decades,   
   propping up publications across the political spectrum. But that doesn’t   
   explain why the falloff has been especially steep on the right side of the   
   media aisle.   
      
   What’s going on? The obvious culprit is Facebook. For years, Facebook’s   
   mysterious algorithms served up links to news and commentary articles,   
   sending droves of traffic to their publishers. But those days are gone.   
   Amid criticism from elected officials and academics who said the social-   
   media giant was spreading hate speech and harmful misinformation, including   
   Russian propaganda, before the 2016 election, Facebook apparently came to   
   question the value of featuring news on its platform. In early 2018, it   
   began deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted   
   by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little   
   further. This past February, it announced that it would do the same on   
   Instagram and Threads. All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing   
   drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary   
   sites. The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media,   
   including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent   
   traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after   
   losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been   
   the worst, on average, for conservative media. (Referral traffic from   
   Google has also declined over the past few years, but far less sharply.)   
      
      
      
   Unsurprisingly, the people who run conservative outlets see this as   
   straightforward proof that Big Tech is trying to silence them. Neil Patel,   
   a co-founder (with Tucker Carlson) of the Daily Caller, told me that the   
   tech giants want “to crush any independent media that was perceived to have   
   been helpful to Trump’s rise.” Patel calls this a form of “Big Tech–driven   
   viewpoint discrimination” that “should scare any fair-minded individual.”   
      
   A simpler explanation is that conservative digital media are   
   disproportionately dependent on social-media referrals in the first place.   
   Many mainstream publications have long-established brand names, large   
   newsrooms to churn out copy, and, in a few cases, large numbers of loyal   
   subscribers. Sites like Breitbart and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire,   
   however, were essentially Facebook-virality machines, adept at injecting   
   irresistibly outrageous, clickable nuggets into people’s feeds. So the   
   drying-up of referrals hit these publications much harder.   
      
      
      
   And so far, unlike some publications that have pivoted away from relying on   
   traffic and programmatic advertising, they’ve struggled to adapt. Rather   
   than stabilizing amid Facebook’s new world order, traffic on the right has   
   mostly continued south. Among the big losers over the past year are The   
   Washington Free Beacon, whose traffic was down 58 percent, and Gateway   
   Pundit, down 62 percent. Compare that with prominent mainstream and liberal   
   sites, which, although still well below their 2020 heights, have at least   
   stanched the bleeding. Traffic to The Washington Post and The New York   
   Times from February 2023 to February 2024 was essentially flat. Slate’s was   
   up 14 percent.   
      
   For conservative media publishers, the financial consequences of such a   
   steep decline in readership are hard to know for certain. None of the best-   
   known names publicly reports revenue figures, and many are supported by   
   rich patrons who may not be in it for the money. But the situation can’t be   
   good. Digital media still rely on advertising, and advertising still goes   
   to places with more, not fewer, people paying attention. Traffic also   
   drives subscriptions.   
      
   More broadly, the loss of readership can’t be helpful to the ideological   
   cause. Top-drawing sites like the conspiratorial Gateway Pundit and   
   Infowars help keep the MAGA faithful faithful by recirculating, amplifying,   
   and sometimes creating the culture-war memes and talking points that   
   dominate right and far-right opinion. Less traffic means less influence.   
      
   Paul Farhi: Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level   
   event’?   
      
   The Daily Caller’s Patel insisted that faltering traffic alone isn’t a   
   death sentence for the onetime lords of the conservative web. With the   
   addition of a subscription service and tighter financial management, the   
   Daily Caller’s financial health is solid and improving, he said. Outlets   
   like his own can still succeed with people who “have lost trust in the   
   corporate media and are actively seeking alternatives.”   
      
   The trouble is that there are now alternatives to the alternatives. The   
   Righting’s proprietor, Howard Polskin, pointed out to me that the websites   
   that dominated the field in 2016—Fox News, Breitbart, The Washington Times,   
   and so on—are no longer the only players in MAGA world. The marketplace has   
   expanded and fragmented since then, splintering the audience seeking   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)