Conservative Media 2019
Howard Polskin at the Columbia Journalism Review:
There are currently about 15 to 20 conservative websites which attract at least one million unique visitors per month. Some are venerable right-wing reliables like National Review, The Washington Times, or Newsmax. Others, like Infowars, The Gateway Pundit, Big League Politics, and Breitbart, mine the far fringes of the right.
The most significant change in the conservative media landscape has been the astonishing traffic growth of Foxnews.com, the digital arm of the most-watched cable news network. Its traffic has doubled since 2015 and is now at more than 100 million unique visitors per month, which represents nearly a third of the U.S. population.
The Fox Corporation-owned website also generates ten times the audience of any other conservative news website offering original content...
Sara Fischer at Axios:
On television, Fox News continues to dominate virtually every metric, while other conservative TV groups are also broadening their reach...
...
Podcasts, meanwhile, have given rise to up-and-coming right-leaning personalities.
- The Joe Rogan Experience, a talk podcast hosted by self-described libertarian Joe Rogan, is an example of a podcast that speaks to a broad group of people, particularly young men, from a slightly right-of-center voice. Rogan's podcast has been one of the most-downloaded podcasts on iTunes for two years, per The Atlantic.
- The Ben Shapiro Show lags a few spots behind Rogan on the charts, which is hosted by conservative commentator and personality Ben Shapiro. He has built a mega-brand aimed at targeting younger conservatives, which also includes a website called The Daily Wire.
Between the lines: Even fringe right social network Gab is exploding, according to a new analysis by Vice. Vice attributes at least part of that growth to the slowdown of traffic to fringe website 8chan, which went offline several weeks ago.
The bottom line: Typically, the opposition party has a media explosion in response to whichever political group is in power. But the economic stress of the media industry, combined with the Trump-driven conservative strategy of broad messaging, has upended that dynamic.
