Atlantic: Traffic To Cultist Sites Has Cratered Since 2020

The Atlantic reports:

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. The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report was down 81 percent; and The Federalist lost a staggering 91 percent. 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.

In early 2018, it began de-emphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little further. All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites. 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.

Read the full article. The above figures compare traffic in February 2020 and February 2024. As you’ll see at the link, the change at Facebook has also affected left-leaning sites, but to a far lesser degree. Photo: Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft.

“The precipitous decline in traffic to conservative publications raises a larger and possibly unanswerable question: Did these operations ever really hold the political and cultural clout that critics ascribed to them at their peak?” –@farhip https://t.co/xZXqMpi6X6

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) April 14, 2024