Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
The Atlantic on Saturday ran an article boasting about right-wing media sites seeing their traffic implode due to algorithmic changes by Facebook and Google — but the joke is on them.
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.
Here’s the charts from TheRighting showing the shift:
What’s so funny about this is that (save Infowars) these are all the sites that would be defending Israel right now on everyone’s Facebook feeds but instead they’ve all been algorithmically crushed.
The decision eight years ago to ban everyone on the “far-right” from social media and close their bank accounts has also clearly backfired as nearly all their ideas have gone mainstream and everyone from Tucker Carlson to Candace Owens is now calling out the Israel Lobby.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it!
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