If you want to live in a right-wing bubble but don’t want to take the time to remember all those URLs, you always have The Righting.com. They take the rightiest articles from across right-wing media and post links to them on their front page. (They also have An A-Z Guide To Right Wing Media for convenience.)
But they occasionally do an original article, and I want to share this one for schadenfreude with my fellow socialist commie lefties.
March 27, 2024, New York, NY –In its second election year traffic report, TheRighting found that the vast majority of right wing news websites it monitored experienced significant audience erosion. Eighty-six percent experienced declines of 44% or more. TheRighting’s analysis looked at February 2024 unique visitors and compared it to February 2020 traffic. Only one right wing news website posted a year-over-year (YOY) traffic increase in TheRighting’s top 15 election year comparison.
TheRighting also released today its analysis of February 2024 vs February 2023 mobile and desktop traffic. The YOY comparison showed that the audiences decreased to most right wing websites during the 12-month period.
More data and more context would help in interpreting these numbers, yet here goes.
February 2020 was not a noteworthy news month. Trump was acquitted in his first impeachment trial and COVID was just starting to break as national news. Neither was February 2023. Maybe enormous outrage was being stirred in right-wing media over issues that didn’t much dent the national media, but nothing seems to explain the huge loss in numbers of unique visitors compared to February 2024.
The losses may be explained in another way. While the extreme, call them MAGA, right continue to be as loud as ever, driving local, state, and national politicians to compete for their favor, a group of less extreme right, conservatives, Republicans, whatever they call themselves, are tired of being fed extremist nonsense.
They’re quietly quitting, paying less attention to right-wing websites, and also sitting out primaries, or even casting protest votes against the only Republican presidential candidate left.
Trump got only 82% of the 200,000 people who bothered to vote in New York’s primary yesterday. For comparison, almost 900,000 votes were cast in 2016. (The 2020 primary was canceled.) The low total is explainable. That Trump keeps losing about 20% of his party in primaries must be troubling to the campaign. Biden loses 5-15%, which must concerning of his campaign but is consistently lower than Trump’s defectors.
Since websites normally depend on ad money, lower numbers imply a death spiral, just as Truth Social and Twitter are seeing. This is not unequivocal good news. Some will vanish, some will become even more extreme. But it’s good news for some of us.