The Drudge Report may still be king of news aggregators, but its well-chronicled leftward lurch helped conservative competitors record huge traffic gains in 2020.
Matt Drudge, the secretive news pioneer whose site rose to prominence during the Clinton administration, has not explained why his site turned against President Trump, but its headlines have increasingly hammered the commander in chief for the last few years. As pro-Trump news junkies turned away, they found friendlier fare on sites such as Citizen Free Press and the Bongino Report.
“It’s fantastic,” Citizen Free Press’s owner, who only goes by Kane, told the Washington Examiner. “I’m breaking every rule in the modern digital news business with no social media, no Facebook, no branding, no contact form, and the site is succeeding beyond my wildest dreams.”
Citizen Free Press is growing the fastest of the new conservative sites. According to industry analyst SimilarWeb, the site saw its monthly visits jump from 7.9 million in October to 11.5 million in November, and Kane boasts that his strategy of constantly rotating fresh headlines through his bare-bones site keeps loyal readers returning all day. The Drudge Report’s monthly unique views dropped to 57.4 million from just over 60 million during the same span.
Kane believes the site he started in May of 2017 could grow to be half the size of Drudge’s by the end of 2021. And the plucky upstart, whose site emulates Drudge in design simplicity, believes he knows one regular reader is his own nemesis.
“I know Matt reads Citizen Free Press, I’ve seen him lift a few of my headlines right after I posted them on Citizen,” said Kane, who adds he has never taken a day off since launching.
The Citizen Free Press now gets “360,000 hardcore readers” every day, Kane said, up from about 80,000 per day, one year ago. The site also gets “close to 10,000 comments every day,” engagement Kane attributes to “word of mouth, 100% organic growth.” The site is poised to cross the monthly threshold of 100 million page views, he said, citing Cloudflare analysis.
According to an analysis by TheRighting, which tracks traffic on conservative websites, the Drudge Report “has experienced year-over-year (YOY) declines in unique visitors in every month of 2020.” Year-over-year traffic to the Drudge Report plunged a whopping 42% in August, even as the presidential election was reaching a fever pitch.
“It’s catastrophic what has happened to his web traffic,” Matt Lysiak, author of “The Drudge Revolution,” told the New York Post earlier this year. “He’s on a fast track to irrelevance.”
The Drudge Report’s traffic still dwarfs that of other news aggregators, according to industry analysts. But in a 24/7 news cycle and a market starved for headlines, there are enough online eyeballs to spawn new success stories on the Right.
Conservative talk show host Dan Bongino told the Washington Examiner that he started his news aggregation website, the Bongino Report, because the Drudge Report was no longer useful in preparing for his daily podcast.
“I looked around, I didn’t really see any options at the time, so I just said ‘I’m going to start my own,’” Bongino said.
“The goal was to create a good, solid option for listeners of my show where they could get some of the best conservative news of the day and to highlight some of the better writers out there who, outside of aggregators, their work may not be seen,” he added.
Bongino said he has seen consistent “month over month” growth at the Bongino Report in 2020, which he expects to continue into 2021 as he puts more effort into publicity.
“Traffic’s been incredible,” Bongino said. “We’re excited for this year. We’re finally putting some money into marketing … so we could see even more growth.”
A third site, Conservative Review, has recently entered the news aggregation fray. President of Blaze Media, Gaston Mooney, whose company recently merged with Conservative Review, told the Washington Examiner they relaunched the website “to help fill a hole we see in the conservative news aggregation marketplace.”
“Looking at the Drudge Report’s decreasing traffic, it’s clear the audience is looking for an alternative news source,” Mooney said.
But the Citizen Free Press is, at the moment at least, the leading competitor to the Drudge Report, with Kane feeling optimistic that the website’s growth will continue into 2021 and beyond.
“Our growth opportunity is almost limitless,” Kane said. “Virtually no one knows about Citizen Free Press because we have no social media presence. The site can grow by 500% from here and still just be scratching the surface of the conservative news market.”
