Fox News, Infowars Post First Traffic Gains in Months
January 24, 2023, New York, NY – After months of sharply declining traffic, Foxnews.com and Infowars generated significant year-over-year (YOY) audience increases according to TheRighting’s exclusive analysis of December 2022 mobile and desktop traffic based on Comscore data.
Fox News saw its unique visitors rise 15% from December 2021 to December 2022, its first increase since February 2022. That represented an increase of 11.5 million unique visitors, the most of any right wing news website surveyed by TheRighting. Furthermore, Fox News had 87,475,000 unique visitors to lead all right wing websites.
Infowars posted a 70% YOY increase, the most of any right wing website for December 2022. It was also Infowars’ first monthly audience gain since October 2021. In December 2022, Infowars attracted 714,000 unique visitors, up from 419,000 in December 2021.
“Fox News and Infowars performed remarkably well in December, which is generally a slow month for news websites,” said Howard Polskin, President and Chief Curator, TheRighting. “Traffic rose to several other conservative sites, although not as dramatically. It’s hard to predict if this trend will continue in a relatively lackluster political news environment. The departure of a White House chief of staff is not the type of news that draws millions of visitors to a website.”
Winners and Losers Among Top 20 Conservative News Websites for December 2022
(by unique visitor percentage increase/decrease from year ago)
Winners
· Infowars (+70%)
· Washington Examiner (+22%)
· Fox News (+15%)
Losers
· The Federalist (-85%)
· Daily Signal (-68%)
· Townhall and RedState (tie) (-66%)
Of the three mainstream news websites that TheRighting follows, only The New York Times brand increased its unique visitors (+10%). Both The Washington Post (-8%) and CNN (-3%) saw their audiences dip, although CNN led all news websites tracked by TheRighting with 126,433,000 unique visitors in December.
The Truth About Truth Social Traffic
Month-to-month traffic to Donald Trump’s Truth Social website, which launched in February 2022, slipped 7% in December to 3,583,000 unique visitors. In November, Mr. Trump’s social media site had 3,857,000 unique visitors. YOY comparison will not be available until February 2023.
Here are the December 2022 unique visitors for the five conservative-friendly social media platforms TheRighting follows:
· Rumble (6,894,000; -16% vs year ago)
· Truth Social (3,583,000; year-ago data NA)
· MeWe (1,024,000; -18% vs year ago)
· Gettr (647,000; -37% vs year ago)
· Parler (103,000; -87% vs year ago)
Each month, TheRighting examines Comscore data on dozens of prominent conservative websites that post original content. TheRighting ranks the top 20 conservative websites on the basis of unique visitors and also provides data on whether unique visitors have increased or decreased year-over-year.
Source: Comscore Media Metrix® Multi-Platform, Custom-defined list, including, but not limited to Foxnews.com, Breitbart.com, DailyCaller.com, WashingtonExaminer.com, WesternJournal.com, Washingtontimes.com, Total Digital Audience, December 2022, U.S.
