Huge traffic declines on right-wing media

Politics & Elections
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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.

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Twitter usage is reportedly plunging. That should provide a big boost in ad revenue.

Twitter/X Usage Sees Sharp Decline - Edison Research.

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There are big declines in ALL media sites, apparently. Not just right-wing.

The link shows 22% decline at NY Times, 19% at CNN and 43% at Washington Post. a whopping 81% at the Drudge Report.

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More and more are putting up paywalls. I think most people are not willing to pay to read one article a week. They might subscribe to a favorite site or three but there are limits. With so many “news” sites out there trying to force a subscription I think people are just walking away.

Also, the mobile version of almost all news sites I see these days are an absolute disaster of ads. Popups, videos, ads every paragraph or two. It’s nuts and really unpleasant. I generally scroll looking for that one tidbit of info (which many now bury to make you scroll further) and leave. Talk about burying the lede!

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Another possible explanation is that the Reactionary Wacko audience and the trolls / bots / etc., who feed them have migrated away from a “visit e.g. Infowar’s website” model to “we push the crap onto Facebook feeds and rely on the audience to spread them amongst their incestuous in-group of like-minded friends = fellow travelers.” Which would make that traffic in RW ideas invisible to the methodology of the OP’s cited study.

FWIW, NextDoor is an absolute hotbed of trumpism and RW wackery in many areas of the country. Or so say some friends who live in such areas.

I’m no expert, but the wacky ideas du jour seem to keep becoming popular at a steady pace. If the audience was actually tuning out in material numbers we’d see a slowing in the number and pace of new wacky ideas gaining currency and also a reduction in the size and/or intensity of each idea’s following.

Do we (the pollsters, the Dopers, the statistics gathering mavens, whoever) see that? I dip my toes directly in that water very little, but it’s not obvious to me there’s been a sea change.

Switching gears …

Back when trump was prez he was popular with a certain fraction of my coworkers. What was disturbing was they saw him as “pranking the system” and they loved that. They weren’t angry at the Ds, so much as angry at the system.

I suspect by now a bunch of them have noticed that actually pranking the system doesn’t produce that many laffs. And unless they really have bought into the false dichotomy of “Trump the Totalitarian Savior or else the End of America!”, they can see his decline into uselessness, and the dangers of klepto-crony totalitarianism and are now quietly pining for the days of more normal Republicans.

How many of those folks are there? Some for sure. Enough to matter? That’s the question on which the future of our Republic hinges.

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I think there’s a diminishment in the supply of R’s who currently prioritize pranking the system. The prank is pulled, the joke’s over, nobody has anything to top it.

They’d prefer to move on, but as long as Trump’s ass is parked in the center of every conversation, it leaves little time to deliberate tax cuts for the rich, raising the retirement age to 87, or shooting migrants out of a cannon back into Mexico.

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…as someone knee-deep in search-engine-optimization at the moment…traffic has tanked everywhere over the last year. This just got posted today:

Its an algorithm thing. It’s a Google thing. It’s an AI thing.

But it doesn’t appear to be a political thing.

AI is one of the biggest disruptors, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to figure out how to get websites to rank now. But in the context of what is happening to website traffic everywhere right now, I wouldn’t read too much into this.

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I wonder. Where do people like Tim Pool and Laura Loomer post? What I see of their posts seem to have no purpose other than to make liberal heads explode. Are their audiences shrinking? That’s part of the context this lacks.

That the mainstream media has been losing viewers has, at least for me, been an issue for a long time. That right-wing media has even greater losses is a surprise and also seems to be for the person quoted in the article.

I can’t get a grip on the public mood this year. This seems like a major data point, but I’m looking for others’ opinions.

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Here’s another explanation. In April of 2016 Ted Cruz still had a viable chance of winning the nomination. In April of 2024 everyone on the ballot had withdrawn their campaign, except Donald Trump. So it makes sense that more people would sit out the primary this year.

I wouldn’t rely on primaries this month so much as polling. And I wouldn’t compare these polls with the ones in April of 2016, either.

With regard to the main topic, I admit to unsubstantiated suspicion that more polemic right-wing site impressions were artificially inflated, and that the drop in traffic since 2020 might have to do with search algorithm updates outpacing Russian cyberwarfare/propaganda, since the latter’s resources are being diverted to Eastern Europe.

~Max

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They may notice that vicariously pranking the system without an audience from the system doesn’t produce that many laffs. Whereas if you can post it on YouTwitFace and no one can do anything about it except whinge, now that’s prime pwning the libs material right there! It’s my first amendment right to make companies make you read what I say without you criticizing it in any way!

Whereas you can’t troll anyone if everyone who sees it is agreeing with you anyway.

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It’s one of my working theories that a significant number of Trump supporters simply want to watch the world burn. Between draining the swamp, going after the Deep State, and changing the Republican Party fo the MAGA Party, Trump has done a, well, I don’t want to say good job, but he’s made a good showing of burning it all to the ground. I do wonder if you’re right. Maybe that particular demographic is no longer amused by the dysfunction.

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I think I’ve been of this opinion for a while now, but this is a really good way of expressing it. And of course, the problem with burning everything to the ground is your left with nothing but ashes.

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pc and console game sites are the worst… I had a really tricked-out tablet … and PC gamer’s ads choked it up a lot to the point of it freezing up …

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I agree that primary participation is down because it’s lock that Trump will win. But what I find interesting is that, of the GOP voters who are still engaged enough to vote, about 20% are voting against Trump. They got off their asses to vote, knowing he was going to win anyways, just to poke him in the eye.

That gives me some small measure of hope. If he can lose anything even close to 20% of the GOP voters, he’s done for in the general election.

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A slight correction / amplification if I may:

If he can lose anything even close to 20% of the GOP voters in the right distribution among the small number of battleground states, he’s done for in the general election.

To be sure, if he loses enough voters, states that were previously battlegrounds become a lock for team Blue, and states that were previously a lock for team Red become battlegrounds instead.

My concern remains that the disaffection with trump is confined to the country club Republicans, not the MAGAs. And the EC is designed to greatly amplify the rural vote, which is far heavier on MAGAs than country clubbers.

As was pointed out in the RFK for president thread overnight, Biden won the national popular vote by ~7M. But in the vote that mattered, the one for EC electors, he won by 315K.

Think about that. 95% of his margin of victory was hand-waved out of existence by the design of the EC. To lose, trump needs to be weakened in lots of those sorts of states.

Which is IMO a much taller order.

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The statistics from the OP don’t actually say that traffic is declining overall on these sites. They say that most sites are seeing a decline in traffic. This could mean an overall decline, or it could mean a consolidation of the same total amount of traffic into a few larger sites.

Just because most retail stores are closing doesn’t mean that Wal-Mart is in trouble, and in fact Wal-Mart’s success is the reason why many stores close.

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Thankfully, Trump doesn’t have to lose anywhere near 20% off his 2020 level of support. 5% will be more than enough provided a sufficient portion of that comes from battleground states.

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This seems unlikely. They listed the fifteen largest sites, all but one with major drops since 2020. The only one increasing is Newsmax, and that by a small amount. Where is the consolidation found? The only big individual site is Fox and that’s down 22%. It’s possible that a new site has overtaken them all, but these seem to be every major right-wing site I’ve heard of, and not only would it be incredibly newsworthy to mention such a winner but it would also change the entire meaning of the article.

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I don’t see any reason to think the anti-Trump GOP vote is all that clumpy. I’d expect it to be reasonably uniform, as each individual voters stops to think about him. It doesn’t matter how Trumpy your neighborhood is when you’re realizing how stupid he is. And as pointed out here:

…the 20% is overkill. Even if the distribution was more lumpy than I think it is, even just a few percent in the most Trumpy regions still kills him. If the actual number of anti-Trump GOP voters is close to 20%, it would be the bigglyest electoral defeat we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes. I’ll still settle for a littlyest defeat, though.

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