News aggregator Matt Drudge, whose eponymous website rose to prominence as the site where anti-establishment news was posted without censorship has seen his numbers crash since he abandoned his base and joined the #NeverTrump crowd.
A year ago in September 2019 Drudge was pulling close to 95 million readers and well over 100 million in August of 2019. This year Drudge’s monthly traffic in August was 63 million readers, according to similarweb.com analytics, down from 66 million in May.
Drudge’s downward spiral began when he mysteriously abandoned the conservative – MAGA viewers that made his website one of the most trafficked sites on the web to become Joe Biden’s biggest cheerleader.
The change was so dramatic that BizPac Review reported, ‘We don’t think Matt is there anymore, word is he sold, just waiting for confirmation’
Drudge’s subsequent sallies at President Trump revealed he was still around, so in our view Matt Drudge has earned his place on the president’s hit list. As Vanity Fair pointed out he was a key player in helping the president win the 2016 Republican primary, and thus the presidency, and visited the White House early on—Trump once called him a “great gentleman” and treated his headlines like gospel.
Mind you, we have no quarrel with “fair and balanced” as the slogan for one news outlet goes, but Drudge suddenly decided to stab President Trump, and by extension his millions of supporters, in the back.
In July, Tucker Carlson, whose Fox News show is regular viewing for the president, called Drudge “firmly a man of the progressive left.”
Drudge relentlessly flacked the phony impeachment narrative put out by serial liar Adam Schiff and has done his best to downplay the China connection to the pandemic, while trying to lay the body count at President Trump’s feet.
The conflict really escalated when a particularly aggressive Drudge headline noted Trump’s denial that a “Mini-Stroke Sent Him to Hospital,” complete with a kicker: “VIDEO: [Trump] Dragging Right Leg.”
Conservatives have naturally voted with their keyboards and taken their web viewing of the news elsewhere, and new anti-establishment web news aggregator have risen to take Drudge’s place.
As the citizenfreepress.com posted:
I have looked at Matt Drudge’s actual traffic numbers, on Quantcast, every week for the past 12 years. Quantcast is a slice of javascript code you install in the header of your website and it counts every page view and visitor. It functions almost exactly the same as Google Analytics.
Matt Drudge used to average 1 billion page views per month, as he famously used to brag. Remember those headlines from 2016 — ‘Thanks a billion!’ He ran that same headline every 30 days for the entire year.
Now in 2020 Drudge Report is getting 475 million page views per month. Though the chart only shows the past 30 days, I can attest that his traffic has been in the 450-500 million range for several months in a row.
So Matty is down 53% from his peak.
“The goal since I started was to get to 10% of Drudge’s traffic by the 2020 election. CFP is at 5% now, so it’s going to be close,” the citizenfreepress told NOQ Report. “For the last 12 months the site has been growing organically by approximately 5,000 readers per month – so we will see if we can hit the goal.”
The site is self-funded and does not carry ads. The content on the site is generally conservative and includes links to major right-leaning sites like Breitbart, Hotair, and RedState. It also links to mainstream media sites, though the headlines often point out buried ledes or address the news with snark that ridicules the news itself. For example, a San Diego Union-Tribute article linked to from CFP had the title ”Will electric planes take flight and help cool a warming planet,” but the link text on CFP framed it as, “Climate freaks want ELECTRIC planes — What could possibly go wrong…”
President Trump has given a shoutout to another Drudge competitor, Revolver.
Tweeting from his @realDonaldTrump account the President posted:
“Our people have all left Drudge. He is a confused MESS, has no clue what happened,” Trump tweeted Monday. “Down 51%. @DRUDGE They like REVOLVER and others!”
Revolver, the outlet Trump mentioned, is one of several more vocally pro-Trump Drudge alternatives that have appeared in recent months. The president retweeted Rep. Paul Gosar (AZ-4) promoting the outlet as a Drudge alternative earlier in the month.
Revolver at https://www.revolver.news/ is part of American Greatness and is unabashedly pro-American and pro-Trump MAGA policy.
For example, here are yesterday’s Revolver exclusives:
Of course, our favorite conservative website remains ConservativeHQ.com, with exclusive conservative news and commentary and aggregated links to other top conservative writers and thinkers. Check our new website through this link.
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