Traffic Plunges For The Drudge Report Website

Screenshot 10/31/20

The Drudge Report posted a 45 percent decline in web traffic in September as the site alienated its core readers by turning against President Trump ahead of the 2020 presidential election, reports The NY Post.

The data — derived from comScore, which tracks the industry — were released in a report by TheRighting, a website that analyzes traffic to right-leaning websites. TheRighting told The Post that the Drudge Report had 1,291,000 unique visitors in September, according to data supplied by comScore, down from 2,340,000 in the same month a year ago.

September’s eye-popping decline marks the ninth month in a row that the political news aggregation website run by reclusive founder Matt Drudge has seen traffic fall, TheRighting said.

The plunge comes at a time when demand for political news has been soaring on both sides of the aisle leading up to a highly charged presidential election. And experts say it’s directly tied to the Drudge Report’s sudden and unexpected switch earlier this year from a conservative-leaning news outlet to one that’s decidedly anti-Trump.

“It’s catastrophic what has happened to his web traffic,” said Matt Lysiak, author of “The Drudge Revolution.” “He’s on a fast track to irrelevance.”

Matt Drudge

Lysiak says some of the Drudge Report’s suffering can be traced to competition from social media services like Twitter. “But what accelerated his decline is when he shifted to the left and turned on Trump and lost many of his core readers. By any criteria, this shift was a complete disaster for him,” Lysiak said.

“Liberals are never going to love Drudge, even if he’s not linking to stories about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden,” Lysiak said of the website that made its name in the 1990s by being the first outlet to report on the brewing Monica Lewinsky scandal. “They’ll always remember what happened with Bill Clinton.”

Drudge had been an ardent promoter of Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election and was reportedly invited to the White House in 2017. But the site and its founder have drawn criticism from readers, including the president, for linking to largely negative stories about the president in recent months.

Growing appetites for political news, meanwhile, have helped traffic to Fox News’ website grow 9 percent in September compared to a year ago, with 104.1 million unique visitors, The Righting said. That lags behind CNN, which pulled 144.5 million unique visitors, up 11 percent, but beats the New York Times brands’ 95.1 million unique visitors in September, up 3 percent compared to the same month a year ago, and the Washington Post with 91.6 million unique visitors, also up 3 percent from a year ago, TheRighting said.

The fastest-growing sites in September were Bongino.com, up 780 percent to 2.6 million unique visitors, according to TheRighting; The Gateway Pundit, up 456 percent to 5.7 million, and CNS News, up 417 percent to 3.9 million unique visitors.