Call me a bad person and shoot me, but what I found today affords me some true Schadenfreude. Here’s the traffic at HuffPost over the last six months as reported by SimilarWeb.
It looks as if views (monthly ones?) have dropped from 120 million to about 12 million, a decrease of about 90%, and the average time spent on the site is a scant 47 seconds. I guess people have gotten tired of their opinions masquerading as news, ads masquerading as news, and their effusive love of Chrissie Teigen, the Royals, Samantha Bee, AOC, and the site’s relentless obsession with identity politics and ideological purity.
Does this mean that Social Justice Warriorism is dead? I doubt it, but maybe people are sick a purely one-sided view of politics. HuffPo, after all, is the Breitbart of the Left.
Desperate to retain readers and clicks, the site has started a new feature, HuffPost Plus, where you pay good money but get nothing except special newsletters. Nobody’s been fooled by this, judging from the vitriolic reader comments when the “offer” was first made.
Yes, I’m a bad person. As Hitchens said of Jerry Falwell, if you gave them an enema they could be buried in a matchbox.
Most of their output seems to be gather a bunch of tweets together and pretend it’s news. Good riddance.
Still huffing the Huffpo, I see. Careful, man, that stuff’ll bring a fella to a bad end faster’n glue. 🙂
“Yes, I’m a bad person.” Nope, just opinionated
I feel almost as bad for them as I do for Evergreen State University.
I may be wrong, but one could conceivably think of HuffPo’s collective nonsense relative to well researched fact based news outlets as the spandrels are relative to columns…..
One of my friends equilibrates sites like HuffPo to “alchemy” of modern investigative journalism.
I used to look st it some but not in several months. My absence has added to the decreased numbers, I suppose.
I don’t think this decline is real. What could cause a 90% decline in 6 months? A more probable explanation is that technical changes have been made which causes the statistics to be scewed. SimilarWeb is not very reliable.
I thought the same.
I took it off my phone as the news notifications were no longer interesting to me. If they have changed their target market from general news, a field in which they have a hard time competing, to some kind of left-wing-Breitbart audience, then such a drop might not be so surprising. They might even expect it, hoping that it will take a year for the new audience to catch on, if they ever do which I doubt.
HuffPost circling the drain
Great!
I guess identity politics and such do not generate the kind of interest that right-wing conspiracy theory does on Fox, etc. There’s just not the entertainment value.
There’s almost no way these numbers could be close to right. A drop like this would require an implosion due to some very significant factors. As far as I’m aware, nothing in particular has happened that would cause such a plummet.
I’m not surprised. I don’t go there as often as I used to because of the automatic LOUD ads and comments that pop up. But 90% seems off. Politico can be just as bad with its “the sky is falling” headlines that try to lure you in.
Does this mean that Social Justice Warriorism is dead?
LOL! Is P.P. Liars still spewing nonsense? Is “Free Thought Blogs” still a thing? Yes? Then the SJW movement is still very much alive.
I didn’t get involved not cuz PCC already pppoooped it for goot reason. Bye and by.
About time. That site has been nothing more than click bait targeted at liberals for years. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a malware vector as well.
Well, according to Alexa, it’s gone from too 500 site to 1570 after a recent steep dive.
Happy schadenfreude.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/huffingtonpost.com?ver=classic
“As Hitchens said of Jerry Falwell, if you gave them an enema they could be buried in a matchbox”.
Haven’t heard that one before. One to keep in mind for the right moment.
This is a trend among a lot of digital media news sites, and is possibly down to Facebook (and other social media giants) changing their algorithms. A lot of their views used to be linked clicks from Facebook, etc.
The regressive Left have constantly badgered social media giants to crack down on links to “fake news”, but it seems to have had a big effect on the SJW sites like Vice, Buzzfeed and HuffPo. I’m not sure how much of it has effected the right wing sites such as Breitbart.