News sites have seen a drop in traffic since former President Trump left office and President Biden was sworn in, Axios reports:
In the months since former President Donald Trump left office, media companies’ readership numbers are plunging — and publishers that rely on partisan, ideological warfare have taken an especially big hit.
Why it matters: Outlets most dependent on controversy to stir up resentments have struggled to find a foothold in the Biden era, according to an Axios analysis of publishers’ readership and engagement trends.
By the numbers: Web traffic, social media engagement and app user sessions suggest that while the entire news industry is experiencing a slump, right-wing outlets are seeing some of the biggest plunges.
- A group of far-right outlets, including Newsmax and The Federalist, saw aggregate traffic drop 44% from February through May compared to the previous six months, according to Comscore data.
- Lefty outlets including Mother Jones and Raw Story saw a 27% drop.
- Mainstream publishers including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Reuters dropped 18%.
Axios has cool charts, you should go look at them. But what does it mean? Andrew Sullivan celebrates it:
It is also an unmitigated good that polarizing, dumb-as-rocks cable news is in such sharp decline. Part of the promise of Biden is that he would keep tribal drama in its place. And he has! Monthly traffic for far-left outlets has dropped 27 percent in the last ten months; for left-leaning media by 17 percent; and for the mainstream (effectively left) by 18 percent. But look at the collapse of far-right media traffic: down 44 percent.
I’m not so sure. I’d love to think that traffic to partisan sites is down because people have become repulsed by it, but how can we be sure? I’d be a lot happier if, say, broadcast news such as NBC, CBS, and ABC (think: 60 Minutes) was reporting concurrent jumps in ratings, as they were about a year ago.
But it’s worth noting that the 2020 Presidential Election campaign and its post-election consequences were extraordinary, between Covid-19, special changes to the voting laws, absurd denials of reality by Trump and his little mob of lawyers – yeah, you can’t call that group a team, and even lawyers is more than stretching a point, as they begin to lose their lawyering privileges – the January 6th insurrection and concurrent wild-eyed theories of Republican members of Congress determined to betray their oaths, and a few other factors.
This contaminates virtually any conclusion, absent more evidence.
But it also remains fascinating. NewsMax/OAN traffic down 44%? Fox News down 22%? Mother Jones down 42%? (As much as I’d like to attribute that drop to Kevin Drum’s retirement, I fear that’s beyond the realm of possibility.) (Yes, go look at the charts!) Did we all abruptly learn that the partisan sites are misleading?
Or are we all just exhausted?
