Mediaite Bucks Downward Trend In Digital Media, Posts Major Traffic Growth

As this election year enters its fourth month, one trend is undeniable: readers just aren’t tuning in like they used to. Analysts have blamed everything from the tightening economics of the digital media industry to a relatively uneventful and uncompetitive primary election season.

As a result, much of digital media is seeing a steep decline in traffic compared to the last presidential primary in 2020. We are proud to report, however, that Mediaite has bucked the trend and posted strong growth, rounding out the first quarter of 2024 with our biggest audience in the history of the site.

The great traffic slump is in the news-cycle thanks to a recent report from The Righting, a website that monitors right-wing media, which has been tracking the drop in traffic this election cycle and found that in addition to slumps at right wing sites, major titles like The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN and The Daily Beast all registered sharp declines in traffic in February of 2024 when compared to the same month in 2020.

According to The Righting: CNN, the world’s largest digital news site, dropped 19 percent in February, compared to 2020, while the Times fell 22 percent for the same period. The Post is down some 44 percent compared to 2020, while the Beast fell 45 percent.

The decreases, however, are seen most strongly in conservative media — with websites like Breitbart, the Federalist, Twitchy, and The Washington Times seeing their audiences drop by an astounding 76-93 percent each.

On the other hand, Mediaite grew 63 percent in total unique viewers and a whopping 185 percent in total page views in February, when compared to 2020.  This comes on the back of a strong 2023, in which Mediaite saw its biggest audience ever: 701 million page views overall.

The only news site tracked by The Righting to notch an increase from Feb. 2020 to Feb. 2024 was Newsmax, which jumped 37 percent – up to 4.3 million unique viewers, less than half of Mediaite’s audience, from 3.1 million in February of 2020.

Most Americans remain unimpressed or decidedly unhappy with the rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, so the media industry looks unlikely to see the highly coveted election bump it has enjoyed in the past, but we will keep chugging along watching what they do.

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