As Drudge Goes Anti-Trump, His Website Is Bleeding & Pro-Trump Sites Are Growing
Drudge Report is feeling the heat as 2019 winds down.
According to The Washington Times, the conservative news aggregator has been bleeding viewers since July, with an up-welling of allegations that site founder Matt Drudge has gone anti-Trump.
Launched in 1996, Drudge Report has been a go-to news aggregation platform for conservatives almost since the advent of the internet.
But recent reports suggest fear is growing among loyal audience members that a recent surge in links to left-wing establishment media content from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post signifies a drastic ideological shift at Drudge.
And the latest from The Washington Times suggests that has translated into a rapidly shrinking readership.
According to the outlet, SimilarWeb market analytics indicate Drudge saw its monthly viewership drop from 96 million to 77 million between July and October — a dismal 15 percent hit.
Meanwhile, comparatively infant right-wing aggregators such as Whatfinger News, The Liberty Daily, Rantingly and NewsAmmo have seen exponential growth in recent months.
Whatfinger News, for instance — linking to unabashedly conservative sites such as Breitbart, The Daily Signal, The Daily Wire, The Western Journal and Fox News’ Opinion section — saw more than 40 percent readership growth.
“Cheekily billing itself as ‘The Conservative Alternative to the Drudge Report,'” The Washington Times reports, The Liberty Daily saw an even more awing 72 percent increase in average monthly viewership in the same time-frame.
Of course, this is not to say Drudge is going anywhere in the near future.
The aforementioned aggregators see readership that pales in comparison to Drudge Report’s, all resting in the low millions even after months of dramatic prosperity.
But to ignore these meaningful market trends over issues of scale would be folly.
It isn’t a media circus, or even wishful thinking, for conservatives to suggest Drudge is bleeding out.
The fact of the matter is that 15 percent losses month after month — though they might take mere pennies from an alternative media giant like Drudge — are not only unsustainable but symbolic.
If nothing else, these numbers serve as a billboard advertisement for conservative America’s growing support for President Donald Trump — support that has grown to rival Republicans’ love of President Ronald Reagan throughout the 1980s or even the left’s love of President Barack Obama in the late 2000s.
Both Trump’s hardcore base and those conservatives who, like myself, came to support this president slowly and oftentimes reluctantly are fed up with the establishment.
They are willing to stand beside this president despite his inability to make good on each and every hyperbolic campaign promise and in spite of partisan impeachment witch hunts, because they have seen tremendous progress toward a conservative agenda under this administration.
And they are happy to find a new alternative to the alternative conservative media if its members decide to lose their teeth and fall in line with the media establishment.
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