SAY HELLO TO ‘KANE’

He’s the Secretive Maestro Behind Citizen Free Press, One of Conservative Media’s Most Popular Websites 

By Howard Polskin, May 2, 2022

There’s no mystery behind the success of the enigmatic Citizen Free Press conservative website.  All it took was one obsessed news junkie toiling almost every waking hour for the past 1825 straight days curating right-wing content specially tailored to capture the MAGA zeitgeist.

Today, a day after the site’s May 1 fifth anniversary, it’s clear that Citizen Free Press (CFP) has quietly emerged as a growing force in conservative media. Outside of the much-visited digital arm of Fox News, CFP  generates more page views than any other conservative website as measured by SimilarWeb.  A link from Citizen Free Press – highly coveted in the right-wing world — can unleash a river of traffic.  When CFP linked to TheRighting on April 25, it drove more than 20,000 visitors to  my site. Another link last October resulted in my most trafficked day in 2021.

CFP defies easy descriptions. It’s not incorrect to call it an aggregation site for right-wing viewpoints, but that ignores the snippets of original content that are sprinkled into the majority of the stories. Each day, about 100 headlines are posted on CFP’s austere home page in a simple linear design, giving the site a heavy 1999 AOL vibe.

“It looks like a 7th grader built it,” confesses the site’s somewhat mysterious founder, who has a fondness for staying offstage in the shadows, preferring the glow of his never-off computer monitor to the spotlight of media attention.

The stark black headlines offer one line of copy strung across the page in type so small that at first glance it looks like a razor-straight lineup of crushed ants. About every five minutes, a new headline hits the top of the home page pushing down the earlier copy.

Steve Bannon has described CFP as the “stack,” and for once Bannon and I agree on something.  Headlines feature a simple sentence like “AOC goes full stupid,” or “The Donald in top form.” About a quarter of the headlines follow the classic aggregation format and take visitors to external news sources, usually somewhere in the conservative media ecosystem.  But most lead farther into the site where the story is fleshed out with Twitter videos, short commentary and images, all provided by the curator.  It’s not close to what is traditionally considered narrative nonfiction or mainstream journalism. However, scan enough CFP headlines and the news of the day shifts into focus, even if it’s a mile wide and an inch deep.  And of course, it’s all filtered through CFP’s right-tilting lens, which is clearly not the preferred perspective of about half the country.

The maestro behind this growing micro-media empire is a 50-ish news junkie who goes by the one-word name Kane, an obvious “Citizen Kane” reference, the film about the notorious press baron William Randolph Heart. He acknowledges that Kane is not his real name. He has lived in Bloomington, Indiana, for more than 20 years with his partner Liz.   He lifts weights, rides his bike and liked golfing before CFP claimed all his free time. Kane says he’s been toiling away on his site every day without a single day off since he launched it with little fanfare in 2017.

“He was poised at the perfect time for the downfall of Drudge and Drudge turning on Trump,” says former Drudge editor Joseph Curl, who launched his own conservative aggregator, Off the Press, last October.  “Plus Kane’s sensibilities are so good.”

To generate the huge volume of headlines he provides, Kane uses three browsers simultaneously with more than 75 tabs open at any one time. For the first year or two, he says, he routinely labored 12 to 14 hours a day.  But as the site grew and developed a following, his workday regularly swelled to 18 hours.  It wasn’t unusual to knock off at 4 a.m. and begin the routine all over again five hours later.

Kane communicates with me through Twitter messages and by phone.  I don’t know his number so he can call me but I can’t call him. He says he’s a University of Virginia graduate who worked as a junior producer in the CNN DC bureau in the late 80s.  His Twitter page provides an image and a line about working for CNN’s then-financial news anchor Lou Dobbs (disclosure: I worked with Lou Dobbs in the late 1990s when I was at CNN). He turns down advertising, as well as all radio and tv appearances except for occasional spots on the podcast “Bannon’s War Room.”

While Kane’s true identity remains his secret, most of the facts about the size of his audience are reliably documented (see chart at the bottom of this page).  Based on the latest publicly available data from SimilarWeb, CFP generated 147 million pages views for February.  Among conservative websites, that figure is surpassed only by Foxnews.com (almost a billion), but the Fox site has the benefit of being attached to the most powerful brand in conservative tv news.  CFP drew more page views than conservative mega-brands like Breitbart, Newsmax Washington Examiner and National Review.  (Sharp readers of TheRighting may notice that I use the Comscore for my monthly analysis.  There is no available Comscore data on CFP because the audience sample wasn’t large enough. That is one reason I have largely ignored the site for the past four years.)

Compared to conservative news aggregators – and I don’t include Drudge in this bucket – CFP has more than 10 times the number of page views as its closest competitor The Liberty Daily.  And when it comes to time spent on the site, CFP’s average visit duration is 20 minutes, more than double leading conservative news sites.  Foxnews.com, for instance has an average visit duration of 8:21 while all other leading news sites are well under four minutes.

“We’re not in the same league at all,” says Joseph Curl of Off the Press, which leads all conservative websites in visit duration (40:57).  “Citizen Free Press is like the Wall Street Journal and we’re like the Palm Beach Post.”

Kane claims he has 500,000 visitors a day to CFP.  “A good link will yield 50,000 hits,” he boasts, and based on my experience I believe him.

Not surprisingly, according to Kane, advertisers have been clamoring to connect with CFP’s engaged audience.  “I’ve had conversations guaranteeing me one million dollars a month,” he says.  “I wouldn’t do that deal because it includes a popup video, which I would never do.”

CFP’s staff comprises Viktor (no last name), a part-time Arkansas professor who handles tech duties, and Spencer Neale, a former Washington Examiner journalist, who assists with the aggregation.  To fund the $11,000 a month payroll plus other expenses, Kane turned to his readers in the last two years who, he says, have provided a healthy six-figure revenue stream.

Kane says he’ll begin accepting advertising by the end of this year so he can cash in on his huge audience.  And later in the decade he thinks he might be ready hit the exit ramp.  He claims that he’s already turned down a multi-million-dollar offer to sell his site.  If that’s true – and it’s reasonable to think so based on the SimilarWeb numbers – other offers are sure to follow.  In the meantime, Kane will continue to stealthily build a powerful conservative media brand. And maybe one day in the near future, Kane will step out from behind the curtain, reveal his real name and take a much deserved bow.

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