Breitbart, the alt-right news site whose executive chairman Steve Bannon was pushed out in January after feuding with President Donald Trump, has lost about half its readership according to comScore, raising questions about its future.

The site dropped from 15 million unique visitors in October, per comScore, to 13.7 million in November, 9.9 million in December, 8.5 million in January and 7.8 million in February.


Its comScore figure for January was down 51 percent from the same month a year earlier, and the February number was down 49 percent from 2017. Last month was the site’s least trafficked since February 2015, four months before Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president.

There are several potential causes for Breitbart’s troubles, including changes to Facebook’s news-feed algorithm, amped up investment in digital by Fox News, and the shifting status of Bannon. Once Trump’s campaign chairman, White House strategist and closest ally, Bannon left the administration in August and returned to Breitbart, only to be forced out by the site’s board after he criticized Trump and his family in Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury.” Without its driving force, Breitbart has struggled to find a clear identity. And after a significantly diminished presence at this year’s CPAC conference, there is a growing sense its influence is on the wane.

“As a talk radio host, I haven’t used a Breitbart story in at least six months,” said conservative commentator Erick Erickson in an email. “They have a lot of readers and lot of people reading by habit, even if not as many. But they seem less able to stimulate a conversation or move an agenda now.”

Morning Media Your guide to the media circus — weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Neither Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow nor a spokesperson responded to requests for comment.

Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor who is now editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, said the site is at a crossroads. “They hitched their wagon to Trump, but more importantly, they hitched their wagon to Bannon,” he said. “And when Bannon left, what was the character of the site going to be? That was always a serious question.”

As Bannon’s star rose along with Trump, Breitbart benefited, said its former spokesman Kurt Bardella. “At one point, Breitbart was considered must-read status because it was thought of as one of the only places to get a window into what the president was thinking,” Bardella said.

But with Bannon exiled from both the site and Trump’s orbit, that’s no longer the case. “Fox News has supplanted Breitbart as having that banner,” Bardella said.

Over the past several months, Fox News has increased its investment in digital and saw strong traffic gains as a result. Before Fox News embarked in that direction last summer, its comScore number tended to be in the 70 million or low 80 millions. Now, it’s more regularly in the high 80s or low 90s.

Rob Faris, research director at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said Breitbart’s rise was in some ways facilitated by Fox News being slow to embrace Trump.

“A big part of Breitbart’s success was that there was a niche to be filled that Fox News was not able to fill at that point,” said Faris, who co-authored a study on the conservative media ecosystem during the election. But now, with Fox‘s prime-time hosts having fully embraced the president, he says, “The role, the importance of Breitbart is diminished.”

“Fox News is the gorilla in the room,” he said.

Web traffic numbers are often disputed, but other tracking firms beyond comScore have also reported Breitbart to be in decline. According to Amazon’s Alexa analytics service, the site has fallen to 273 in world rank, down 33 positions over the past three months. And SimilarWeb has the site’s overall traffic down 22 percent since October.

Aside from Fox News, the site’s audience remains much larger than most other conservative sites, like The Daily Caller and the Independent Journal Review.

Breitbart appears to have been particularly hard hit by Facebook’s Jan. 12 announcement that it would scale back on posts from news organizations in users’ feeds. In February, comScore reported some dip in traffic for sites across the political spectrum but an analysis by The Outline found that conservative sites were affected most. The study found that, though Breitbart was posting about 9 percent less content on Facebook, its engagement had dropped by nearly 28 percent.

“Other [conservative] sites are getting killed, other sites are really taking it on the chin,” Shapiro said, suggesting that not all of Breitbart’s problems are unique.

But Breitbart’s decline in traffic comes at the same time its advertising base has been decimated by a boycott campaign. Its number of direct advertisers has been slashed from around 250 at the beginning of 2017 to just 17 now, according to the advertising consulting firm, MediaRadar.

Asked whether Breitbart is in trouble, MediaRadar CEO Todd Krizelman said, “From an advertising perspective yes, very clearly.” He cautioned, though, that it is impossible to know how much the site makes from other sources, like selling merchandise. The site also is backed by wealthy conservative donor Rebekah Mercer, though her father, Robert, has already disassociated himself from it.

The Mercers are also owners of Cambridge Analytica, the campaign-data firm that has been accused of mining user data from Facebook.

“I think there’s always a possibility for turnaround with any of these sites,” Shapiro said. “There are broader questions about the entire news business model, obviously. You combine that with a site that’s lost its editorial mission, and they’re going to need to figure out who they are and what they stand for.”