With its former chairman Steve Bannon as White House chief strategist and plans for an ambitious international expansion, Breitbart was supposed to be on its way to becoming a media behemoth in the Trump era, one with unparalleled access and a passionate audience. ”While several publishers have enjoyed an uptick in traffic due to election coverage, we are proud to have built a massive and deeply-rooted community that will remain long after the election cycle fades," Larry Solov, Breitbart's C.E.O., predicted back in November.
Early on, Solov's prediction seemed to be coming true. ”Breitbart News is the #45th most trafficked website in the United States, according to rankings from Amazon's analytics company, Alexa.com," they wrote on January 9, 2017. ”With over two billion pageviews generated in 2016 and 45 million unique monthly visitors, Breitbart News has now surpassed Fox News (#47), Huffington Post (#50), Washington Post (#53), and Buzzfeed (#64) in traffic." A month later, the site had even greater cause to celebrate. ”Breitbart News is now the 29th most trafficked site in the United States, surpassing PornHub and ESPN," they crowed. In the article, its staffers bragged that their bonkers traffic reflected the site's cementing a permanent place in American politics. ”The numbers speak for themselves," said Solov. (Many outlets, including The Hive, experienced traffic peaks around Trump's inauguration.)
Just a few months later, the numbers have a different story to tell. As of May 26, 2017, according to Alexa.com—the same web-ranking analytics company that Breitbart drew its numbers from in January—Fox News is the 64th most-trafficked site in the country. Huffington Post is at 60. Buzzfeed is at 50. The Washington Post, on the strength of a series of eye-popping scoops, is at 41.
Breitbart is in 281st place.
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Other conservative media sites have also experienced declines in traffic in recent months, but none as pronounced as Breitbart's. According to Alexa data, National Review Online, *************, The Daily Caller, and Drudge Report all saw slumps in their rankings. Over the last week, as Trump was engulfed in the Comey scandal, Fox News's viewership dropped to third place behind CNN and MSNBC for the first time in 17 years.
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Another factor could be an apparent decline in the number of times Breitbart stories receive a link from Matt Drudge—a single link on the Drudge Report homepage can fuel an entire month's worth of web traffic. Andrew Breitbart, a former Drudge employee, essentially built his organization on the back of the Drudge Report; Bannon continued the close relationship after Breitbart's death. (”Bannon used to go around bragging that he ran Drudge [and that] he could get a Drudge link anytime he wanted," said the former Breitbarter.) Many see the current editor, Alex Marlow, as having a more difficult time now that Bannon has gone. Says the former staffer, ”Alex's main strategy was to get Drudge links," while Bannon was there. ”When that's your training, it's hard to get away from that." (Drudge did not return a request for comment.)
