The rise and fall of Breitbart News is like a Greek tragedy, or Breaking Bad when Walt chooses evil over his family. And it looks like we’re in the last act.
“Breitbart News is the #45th most trafficked website in the United States, according to rankings from Amazon’s analytics company, Alexa.com,” they wrote on January 9, 2017. “With over two billion pageviews generated in 2016 and 45 million unique monthly visitors, Breitbart News has now surpassed Fox News (#47), Huffington Post (#50), Washington Post (#53), and Buzzfeed (#64) in traffic.” A month later, the site had even greater cause to celebrate. “Breitbart News is now the 29th most trafficked site in the United States, surpassing PornHub and ESPN,” they crowed. In the article, its staffers bragged that their bonkers traffic reflected the site’s cementing a permanent place in American politics. “The numbers speak for themselves,” said Solov. (Many outlets, including The Hive, experienced traffic peaks around Trump’s inauguration.)
Just a few months later, the numbers have a different story to tell. As of May 26, 2017, according to Alexa.com—the same web-ranking analytics company that Breitbart drew its numbers from in January—Fox News is the 64th most-trafficked site in the country. Huffington Post is at 60. Buzzfeed is at 50. The Washington Post, on the strength of a series of eye-popping scoops, is at 41.
Breitbart is in 281st place.
So people are beginning to wonder – why did they jump up so quickly, and jump down so badly? It doesn’t quite appear too… organic…
I'm no analytics guy, but these huge Breitbart traffic swings over the last yr seem too sudden/extreme to be organic https://t.co/L22pIyaaJx pic.twitter.com/nFEnIYiH3Z
— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) May 26, 2017
The rapid December rise & precipitous May fall of Breitbart traffic makes for a very strange mesa-shaped trend line. https://t.co/x4nN1OMtFz pic.twitter.com/AvG0WrGwR3
— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) May 26, 2017
@Noahpinion Alexa showed very strange traffic patterns for Breitbart – patterns shared by Infowars, zerohedge but not any other conservative news site
— Will Stancil (@whstancil) May 28, 2017
SO what’s going on here? Did they buy clicks? Did they defraud their advertisers? I’m just a guy asking questions….