Right-wing propaganda website Breitbart’s traffic seems to be doing its best impression of Donald Trump’s presidency lately.
In January, when conservatives’ hopes about Trump were still high, Breitbart was the 45th most visited website according to Amazon’s analytics company, Alexa. To put this in perspective, at the same time Buzzfeed was ranked 64 and Fox News was 47.
By February, the site was bragging that they had made it into the top 30, surpassing even PornHub.
By May, Breitbart was bowing to its new master on the Right, Drudge Report as everyone else trampled over it. Vanity Fair helpfully provides some screenshots of Steve Bannon’s former home burning to the ground:
![](<p>Did you know that 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio was once a football player? </p>
<p>Rubio kicked off his college career on a football scholarship at Tarkio College before the school went bankrupt in 1993 after their financial aid department knowingly handed out loans and grants to ineligible students <em>(A 1991 piece in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/17/education/a-college-acts-in-desperation-and-dies-playing-the-lender.html" target="_blank">New York Times</a> notes that Rubio’s former place of instruction “set up illegitimate off-campus programs and signed up thousands of unprepared students, many of them whisked right off city street,” leading to high dropout rates and a default rate of 80 percent — the highest in the nation at the time). </em></p>
<p>It’s well known that Rubio is a huge fan of Football — especially the Dolphins — so it’s only natural that he would throw around the ole pigskin with some kids from time to time, as he did in an Iowa suburb when he took a break from pretending that he has a chance to be President.</p>
<p>While engaging in a bit of sport, Rubio managed to throw a wobbly, almost uncatchable pass to a young child, hitting the kid in the face and causing the unfortunate receiver to fall to the ground.</p>
<h3>…and the internet went wild:</h3>
<p><a href="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_16-00-50.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-38506" src="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_16-00-50.jpg" alt="2015-08-18_16-00-50" width="467" height="204" /></a> <a href="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_15-53-50.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-38507" src="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_15-53-50.jpg" alt="2015-08-18_15-53-50" width="506" height="198" /></a> <a href="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_15-50-17.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-38508" src="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_15-50-17.jpg" alt="2015-08-18_15-50-17" width="517" height="223" /></a> <a href="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_15-43-35.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-38509" src="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_15-43-35.jpg" alt="2015-08-18_15-43-35" width="512" height="190" /></a> <a href="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_16-32-13.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-38510" src="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_16-32-13.jpg" alt="2015-08-18_16-32-13" width="467" height="194" /></a> <a href="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_16-32-57.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-38512" src="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_16-32-57.jpg" alt="2015-08-18_16-32-57" width="463" height="171" /></a> <a href="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_16-34-27.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-38513" src="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_16-34-27.jpg" alt="2015-08-18_16-34-27" width="464" height="172" /></a> <a href="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_16-33-56.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-38514" src="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_16-33-56.jpg" alt="2015-08-18_16-33-56" width="463" height="175" /></a></p>
<p>This isn’t the first time one of Rubio’s blunders has gone viral. After all, who can forget his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19ZxJVnM5Gs" target="_blank">response to the 2013 State of the Union address</a>?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_16-42-35.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-38517" src="http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015-08-18_16-42-35.jpg" alt="2015-08-18_16-42-35" width="845" height="421" /></a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>It’s almost baffling that, for all the kicking and screaming Rubio has done in an effort to <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/16/politics/gop-poll-jeb-bush-scott-walker-marco-rubio-drop-2016/index.html" target="_blank">finally get some attention</a>, all he really needed to do was pummel a child in the face with an awful pass. It will be interesting to see if his poll numbers rise in the wake of Football-gate (we put “-gate” after everything now, right?). It’s not like he can sink much lower than 4 percent.</p>
<p>You can watch the highly-entertaining former football player’s awful pass here:</p>
<p>[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcZ94YyxCcw&w=560&h=315]</p>
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<p><em>Featured Image via <a href="http://<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7MHn88nkYX4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>" target="_blank">YouTube</a></em></p>
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Breitbart, possibly thanks to the Russia scandal and their decision to act as the mouthpiece for the Trump administration no matter how bad things have gotten, dropped to 281st place and experienced a devastating 53% drop in traffic.
“Measuring web traffic is an inexact art, but other web-analytics companies reflect a similar, unusually steep decline in Breitbart’s traffic. ComScore estimated that Breitbart had nearly 23 million unique visitors during the month of November 2016, but only drew 10.7 million in April 2017, a 53 percent drop,” Vanity Fair notes. “Last month, the site had fewer visitors than it did in April 2016, when 12.3 million people visited the site. In contrast, the four sites that Breitbart benchmarked itself against saw nowhere near that drop—and, in the case of both Fox News and Buzzfeed, saw small increases in traffic since the November election.”
Naturally, the internet loves this:
oh hey that’s so interesting since Breitbart has long been bullshitting about its traffic by no small amount —-> https://t.co/uGt794HKCp https://t.co/GNuE7D7njT
— Mark Follman (@markfollman) May 27, 2017
Breitbart traffic down 53%. Can we call the First the “Give ‘Em Enough Rope Amendment”?https://t.co/65Ysym0y81
— Brook Ellingwood (@belling) May 26, 2017
So now that Breitbart is losing considerable traffic, maybe the remaining advertisers can pull their ads… 🙄
— The Duo (@SocraticTense) May 26, 2017
@willsommer @mmfa Guess their former readers are so busy experiencing vast economic prosperity they have no time to read Breitbart.
— kcato58 (@kcato58) May 26, 2017
@willsommer pic.twitter.com/yHaPsioWLe
— Borg Queen resists (@The_Borg_Queen_) May 26, 2017
@willsommer Cause they built a cottage industry out of vilifying the Obama’s. They’re gone now, so they don’t have a boogeyman to sell to their rubes
— SHABINDIGO (@SHABINDIGO) May 26, 2017
@willsommer Who needs to check there when they get it first-hand from trump?
— wetlord jjjjjjjjjjjj (@DJCPI) May 26, 2017
@willsommer @OscartheOrange Oh dear! What.a.fucking.shame!
— Oolon Colluphid (@ICHACAWAB) May 26, 2017
@willsommer Meanwhile “failing” @nytimes sees rise in subscriptions.
— Brice Sherratt (@bricesherratt) May 27, 2017
@willsommer @EmilyGorcenski Trump is a sinking ship. What else was there to expect when you got on board?
— Jennavie (@jennavie_c) May 26, 2017
@willsommer @mattdpearce Like Fox News, they really, really REALLY needed Hillary in the White House.
— Peter Principle (@PeterPrinciple2) May 26, 2017
@willsommer @mattdpearce i bet the traffic went to more openly racist mysoginist sites than breitbart… pic.twitter.com/QZtXW7CoW5
— #TrumpIsASnowflake (@UnitePink) May 26, 2017
@willsommer don’t tell me between Infowars & Breitbart the alt-right are tired of conspiracy theories already? Or case of no hate worthy targets left?
— Johanna Gard (@GardJohanna) May 26, 2017
Is Donald Trump’s corruption finally evident to even the people who would typically read Breitbart? If so, this could be the beginning of the end of conservative media — the majority of which decided to hop on the Titanic with an iceberg in full view.
Featured image via Getty Images