President Donald Trump slammed Matt Drudge and his Drudge Report Sunday and Monday, and while it’s subjective to argue whether the right-leaning news aggregator has moved away from positive Trump stories, one thing is true: Drudge’s readership is down a whopping 38% from last year.
According to Comscore data, the Drudge Report had 1.488 million unique visitors in July 2020 — the most recent month for which data is available. That’s down 38.0% from July 2019, when the site boasted 2.399 million unique visitors.
Remarking on a post that said the Drudge Report had seen a “historic crash,” the president wrote on Twitter Sunday, “Such an honor! Drudge is down 40% plus since he became Fake News. Most importantly, he’s bleeding profusely, and is no longer “hot”. But others are! Lost ALL Trumpers.”
Trump continued his attacks on Monday: “Our people have all left Drudge. He is a confused MESS, has no clue what happened. Down 51%. @DRUDGE They like REVOLVER and others!” It was not immediately clear what that 51% figure referenced.
Drudge did not immediately return a request for comment.
According to Similarweb, the Drudge Report had 63.22 million visits, or page views, in August 2020 — a slight drop of 3.26% from the previous month. But the site boasted as many as 96 million visits in July 2019.
Drudge — whose claim to fame is that he aggregates news from around the internet and lists headlines and links in a simple format on his website, often deciding the talking points of the day — has faced steady criticism not only from Trump, but from other conservatives for not being friendly enough to Trump particularly in the lead-up to the 2020 election with headlines like Monday’s “Trump Could Be on Trial Sooner Than Think…”
Notably, Fox News alum Dan Bongino launched his own site late last year to highlight news from conservative outlets as a competitor to the Drudge Report.