Commentary

Red Sites Ebbed As Blue Wave Flowed: Major Right-Wing Visitors Plunged

by Joe Mandese , November 29, 2018

The midterms may have resulted in a blue wave, but the run-up in October showed some ebb and flow among the most prominent “red” news sites, according to an exclusive analysis by political spectrum news site tracker TheRighting.

“Several prominent conservative websites posted steep double-digit drops in unique visitors in October 2018 compared to October 2017,” TheRighting President Howard Polskin notes, citing the following examples: Infowars (-66%), Hannity.com (-49%), Breitbart (-42%) and Newsmax (-28%).

All four rank in TheRighting’s top 20 conservative websites of the month.

Infowars' precipitous decline is noteworthy, because the site previously benefitted from a surge in traffic when it was banned from several social media platforms earlier this year.

Not all right-wing sites ebbed in October. Among those that flowed: The Weekly Standard generated an 80% increase in year-over-year unique visitors, followed by The Washington Times, (+37%), RedState (+31%), RushLimbaugh.com (+30%), and The Federalist (23%).

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2 comments about "Red Sites Ebbed As Blue Wave Flowed: Major Right-Wing Visitors Plunged".

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Tim Brooks from consultant, November 29, 2018 at 12:08 p.m.
An interesting chart, Joe, but I think the headline buries the main takeaways. First is that Fox News virtually owns this space, with more than ten times the traffic of #2 and more uniques than all the others combined (I think), and it barely moved (-4%). Also, that #2 Beitbart was down significantly but #3 and #4, both of which I believe get major exposure on Fox, were up. If you go down the list of smaller sites slightly more are down (10) than up (8), but there's really not much difference. "Red Sites Ebbed"? "Major Right Wing Visitors Plunged"?
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Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, November 29, 2018 at 4:26 p.m.

I also found this table rather interesting. A quick guess at the actual change in total visitors, counting all of the sites together but weighted by their size, seems to indicate a decline of only about 3-4% which shows a surprising amount of stickiness even if there were some pretty big swings up or down for a number of the individual sites. If anyone has the time and checks the math please correct me if I'm off on this estimate.