Audience Visits to Breitbart Drop in April for Sixth Consecutive Month

May 17, 2018, New York, NY – Hampered by a relatively sluggish news environment with no major developments, Breitbart posted its sixth consecutive month of decreased audience visits to its website.  TheRighting’s exclusive analysis of  SimilarWeb data found drop-offs in audience visits beginning last November and continuing through April 2018.  The last time Breitbart experienced a month-to-month increase was October 2017 when visits rose 16% from the previous month.  

 

Breitbart has suffered a drop of almost 30% in audience visits from October to April.  The number of monthly visits to Breitbart since October 2017 to April 2018 were as follows: 89,390,000 (October, 2017); 82,980,000 (November, 2017), 81,160,000 (December 2017), 78,000,000 (January, 2018), 69,640,000 (February 2018), 68,580,000 (March 2018), 62,830,000 (April 2018).  

 

In April, audience visits to Breitbart slumped 8.27% from March, a loss of almost six million visits.  

 

“While 80% of TheRighting’s top 20 websites for April had drop-offs in audience visits, a losing streak of six consecutive months is noteworthy for a popular media outlet like Breitbart with so much influence,” said Howard Polskin, President and Chief Curator, TheRighting.  “The generally stable April news environment certainly didn’t help Breitbart attract bigger audiences, but they even had declines in visits during robust periods like January 2018 – the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration – when audience visits climbed for the vast majority of top 20 conservative websites.”

 

Leaders and Laggards Among Top 20 Conservative Websites for April 2018

(by visit percentage increase/decrease from the previous month of March 2018):

Leaders:

·     The Western Journal (+51.07%)

·     The Daily Wire (+5.42%)

·     Fox News (+2.36%) 

Laggards

·     The Conservative Tribune (-54.44%)

·     The Washington Free Beacon (-14.79%)

·     Newsmax (-14.72%)

 

The top 5 conservative websites in total April visits are as follows:

1.    Foxnews.com (312,670,000)

2.    Breitbart (62,830,000)

3.    The Daily Caller (25,980,000)

4.    The Daily Wire (21,730,000)

5.    Infowars (17,420,000)

 

Three prominent mainstream media sites TheRighting tracks each month recorded mixed results for April-over-March visits: CNN (+0.23%), The New York Times (-3.05%), and The Washington Post (-5.68%).  

 

Among other trends TheRighting found in April:

·     Neo-Nazi website captures millions of visits: The Daily Stormer had 2,510,000 visits for April.  That didn’t vault the site into TheRighting’s top 20 but it was more than The Weekly Standard (1,960,000 visits) or Sinclair’s Circa (1,140,000 visits). 

·     Most social:  33.05% of visits to The Daily Wire came from social, the most of any top 20 conservative websites.

·     Friendliest with Facebook:  78.61% of all visits from social to The Western Journal came from Facebook, the most of any top 20 conservative website.  

 

Each month, TheRighting examines SimilarWeb data on dozens of prominent conservative websites that post original content. TheRighting ranks the top 20 conservative websites on the basis of total monthly visits and also provides data on whether visits have increased or decreased from the previous month.  That information is posted on the Metrics section of TheRighting’s website. (April 2018 data available here.)  

 

TheRighting publishes an A-Z Guide to Right-Wing Mediaon its website and updates it regularly.  It features descriptions about prominent right-wing media websites.