Fox News Audience Continues to Grow, as MSM Sites Sag
TheRighting released its August 2024 election year traffic analysis of mobile and desktop traffic for right wing and mainstream news websites based on Comscore data.
Among the highlights of TheRighting’s August 2024 findings:
TRUTH SOCIAL CONTINUES TO ATTRACT MORE UNIQUE VISITORS
The Donald Trump-controlled Truth Social platform had the second-highest number of unique visitors in its history, almost shattering last month’s record-breaking performance. The site attracted 5,650,000 unique visitors in August, just under last month’s record of 5,672,000. Traffic to the platform had been decreasing the three months prior to July.
Here are the unique visitors for the three conservative-friendly social media platforms TheRighting follows:
–Rumble (7,234,000 unique visitors; -28% vs year ago)
–Truth Social 5,650,000; +65% vs year ago)
–Gettr (167,000; -59% vs year ago)
“Traffic to Truth Social is almost as volatile as its share price,” said Howard Polskin, President and Founder, TheRighting. “Some months it’s very low and then it can quickly rebound to very high levels. It appears uniquely sensitive to the news environment and traffic tends to soar more than most sites when dramatic events like the political conventions or assassination attemps occur.”
AUGUST 2024 VS AUGUST 2023
For the most part, traffic to right wing news websites was softer in August after the robust numbers that were posted in July, a month dominated by major news events. Forty percent of right wing news websites had year-over-year (YOY) audience gains. While the three mainstream news websites TheRighting follows regularly all had middling traffic performances, Fox News saw its YOY traffic rise 10% in August 2024, compared to August 2023.
The Washington Post increased its YOY audience by 1%. Traffic to the NY Times was flat compared to August 2023. And traffic sagged 10% for CNN.
“The four-day Democratic National Convention in August and the selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to the presidential ticket helped drive eyeballs to news websites, but overall it wasn’t enough to help most websites exceed August 2023 traffic,” said Polskin.
YOY Winners and Losers Among Top 20 Right Wing News Websites for August 2024
(by unique visitor percentage increase/decrease from year ago)
Winners
–RedState (+111%)
–Washington Times (+87%)
–The Gateway Pundit (+60%)
Losers
–The Federalist (-79%)
–Daily Signal (-71%)
–Townhall (-69%)
AUGUST 2024 VS AUGUST 2020
Once again, traffic to right wing news websites plunged over the four-year period. Of the 15 sites monitored by TheRighting, ten had audience declines of at least 50% since August 2020. The Federalist (-97%), Townhall (-91%) and Breitbart (-90%) suffered the largest audience erosion. Newsmax was the only news website tracked by TheRighting that posted a rise in unique visitors (+58%) from August 2020 to August 2024.
Audience levels to mainstream and progressive news sites also dropped during this period. While some lost as much as a third or even more of their traffic, none of the sites followed by TheRighting had declines of more than 50%.
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, August 2024, U.S.
