Right-wing publication Breitbart New has taken a hit in viewership in the last six months, according to Politico.
The news outlet reports that figures collected from the analytics service comScore show that Breitbart’s website traffic has decreased by nearly 50 percent since October. The publication saw its traffic go from 15 million visitors to 7.8 million.
According to Politico, former Breitbart employees and analyst contribute the loss in readers to the many factors but point to the expansion of Fox News’ digital platform as the main culprit. Since expanding digitally, Fox News has been able to attract 90 million visitors per month.
Rob Faris, research director at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, believes Fox News has cornered the market for right-leaning rhetoric that Breitbart once dominated. “A big part of Breitbart’s success was that there was a niche to be filled that Fox News was not able to fill at that point,” Faris told Politico.
Alongside the rise of Fox News, according to MediaRadar, a firm that tracks online advertising, Breitbart has seen nearly all of their advertisement revenue dry up due to boycotts of businesses associated with the site.
Aside from the lack of ad revenue, the ousting of former chairman Stephen Bannon may be a cause for the drop. "They hitched their wagon to Trump, but more importantly, they hitched their wagon to Bannon,” former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro said. "And when Bannon left, what was the character of the site going to be? That was always a serious question.”
Source: thehill.com
