Two months after the forced exit of Steve Bannon, Breitbart News Network, the center of the right-wing Internet, is still adrift. Last year, the Breitbart crew had triumphantly stomped through the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, high off their reputation as having predicted and facilitated the Trump phenomenon under the leadership of their ex-chairman. Breitbart editors dominated the speaker lineup, moderating at least four panels; Breitbart sponsored the conference, its logo plastered everywhere; and Breitbart ruled over the social scene, hosting the Friday night boat party that no one could get into. This year, however, Breitbart barely made a splash: no sponsorships, only one speaker, no booth at Radio Row. And that Friday night, one year after the boat luau, the 20 Breitbart reporters who showed up to cover the event were reduced to convening at the local Nando’s Peri-Peri for flame-grilled chicken and garlic bread.

Charlie Spiering, the site’s White House correspondent, told a local radio show that the decision to dial Breitbart’s CPAC presence down to a low whisper was based on financial prudence. ”Last year we really blew the budget,” he joked, describing 2017 as a “celebration” of their power. “Now it’s the midterms, now it’s not as energetic, so this was a financial decision.” But among those on the right, from the populist fringes to the centrist Never Trumpers, it was a symptom of a much larger problem facing Breitbart: without Bannon or a similarly charismatic figurehead, Breitbart had become just another right-wing site with a pro-Trump bent. “Populism and nationalism is almost always a cult of personality,” said Matt Lewis, a conservative columnist at the Daily Beast, pointing to George Wallace and Huey Long as examples of charismatic populists whose movements died along with them. Andrew Breitbart and Steve Bannon, Lewis joked, were like “Lenin and Stalin,” but proved the same point. “I just don’t think that the ideas are strong enough to sustain without a demagogue, so it doesn’t surprise me that without Bannon, Breitbart wouldn’t work.”

Bannon’s absence is certainly a central reason for Breitbart’s current lack of direction. Despite Spiering’s insistence that the site ran just fine without him, it was Bannon who yoked Breitbart’s young writers to his ambitions, transforming a flailing newsroom into the political weapon that ultimately cost the G.O.P. an easy Senate seat in Alabama. And it was Bannon who provided the site with a mission, however misguided. When Donald Trump ultimately denounced Bannon as an opportunistic shill who had “little to do” with the 2016 election, turning him into a pariah on the far right, Breitbart seemed to have an identity crisis. The true epicenter of the populist movement was revealed to be in the White House. (Neither Bannon nor Breitbart responded to a request for comment.)

The Breitbart-Bannon divorce was illuminating in other ways, too. Under Bannon, Breitbart News Network was never so much a business as it was an ideological vehicle: a “war machine” and a set of “weapons,” its reporters more soldiers than journalists. Indeed, the idea of molding Breitbart into a profitable digital business was so foreign to Bannon that the site only began building a formal sales team in 2017—after he left for the White House. So when the winds shifted, the storm hit hard.

Breitbart isn’t the only outlet that has struggled, of course. It has been a cruel year for digital media upstarts across the board, both mainstream and right-wing. BuzzFeed, one of the original Web success stories, announced its annual revenue fell $70 million short of its $350 million target; in November, Mashable, a site once valued at $250 million, was sold for $50 million. Legacy media organizations didn’t escape the humbling, either: CNN recently laid off dozens of staffers in its digital operation.