(The Righting) While almost all major conservative news websites experienced audience declines in August, Newsmax posted its third straight month of year-over-year (YOY) traffic increases according to TheRighting’s exclusive analysis of August 2021 mobile and desktop traffic based on Comscore data. Newsmax attracted 6,067,000 unique visitors in August 2021, up 72% from August 2020 when it drew 3,522,000 unique visitors. The Epoch Times was the only other conservative news outlet that increased its YOY audience in August in TheRighting’s top 20.
YOY traffic to DonaldJTrump.com, the website of the former president, continued to fall dramatically. A year ago, 20,251,000 unique visitors came to the website. However, in August, 2021, the website lost just over 19 million unique visitors dropping 95% in 12 months.
Foxnews.com continued its reign as the highest-ranked conservative website in TheRighting’s survey with 90,423,000 unique visitors last month. However, it recorded its ninth straight month of audience declines (-20%).
“I anticipate year-over-year traffic to conservative news sites to continue to fall over the next six months,” said Howard Polskin, President and Curator, TheRighting. “A year ago, our country was at the beginning of one of the most newsworthy periods in a generation. Unless some unforeseen events occur, the current news environment will not drive the huge audience numbers we saw in 2020 and early 2021.”
Leaders and Losers Among Top 20 Conservative News Websites for 2021
(by unique visitor percentage increase/decrease from year ago)
Leaders
· Newsmax (+72%)
· The Epoch Times (+34%)
Losers
· CNSNews (-80%)
· The Federalist (-78%)
· Washington Examiner (-71%)
The three mainstream news brands TheRighting tracks each month also experienced YOY audience declines. Unique visitors dropped at Washingtonpost.com (-24%), The New York Times brand (-22%) and CNN.com (-19%).
Parler Talk
For the third straight month, traffic to Parler plunged as the site lost more than a million YOY unique visitors. The number of unique visitors for three conservative-friendly social media sites for August 2021 are as follows:
· Rumble (10,887,000; +368% vs year ago)
· Mewe (1,659,000; +124% vs year ago)
· Parler (673,000; -63% vs year ago
Source: Comscore Media Metrix® Multi-Platform, Custom-defined list, including, but not limited to Foxnews.com, Breitbart.com, DailyCaller.com, WashingtonExaminer.com, WesternJournal.com, Washingtontimes.com, Total Digital Audience, August 2021, U.S.
