Former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer talks with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade and how he thinks this move

Traffic Down at News and Politics Websites

In his post “Right-wing websites are hemorrhaging traffic,” Kevin Drum compiles the chart below from data at something called TheRighting :

The numbers are a comparison with the same point in the 2020 cycle. The site also notes “Traffic tanked to most right wing websites for the sixth straight month. Only five right wing news websites posted gains in YOY unique visitors.

Drum rightly wonders, “Somehow Newsmax has bucked the trend. What is its secret?”

But my immediate reaction was: How does this compare to what’s happening on the left? Unfortunately, the site in question doesn’t really track that data, since its purpose is to spotlight right-wing media.

Still, they do provide this:

We’re definitely seeing a decrease in traffic across the board, with WaPo, NYT, and CNN ll showing declines. For that matter, Slate and The Daily Beast are also off considerably.

I don’t have the time to go through Comstat’s data (assuming it’s not paywalled) to do more detailed analysis but, from the sample provided, it looks to me like 1) traffic is down pretty much across the board in the news and political opinion space but 2) it is indeed down further on right-leaning sites.

As to Drum’s question, my instinctive answer—that Newsmax caters to the most hardcore righties—is reinforced by the fact that Daily Kos is the only one of the listed left-leaning sites that’s pretty much holding steady. Which makes sense to me. Americans overwhelmingly are dissatisfied with the two major party candidates, a rematch of the 2020 contest. They’re naturally not going to consume the news wth the same fervor as they did four years ago.

It also occurs to me that February 2020 was right at the outset of the COVID pandemic. That obviously gave folks more incentive to tune into the news.