Ben Shapiro's YouTube traffic is in free fall

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Earlier this month, I wrote about all the evidence piling up that something has gone wrong with the right-wing content industry. Hungary’s new prime minister says he’s cutting funds for Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), influencers like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are publicly feuding with President Donald Trump, Ashley St. Clair is spilling Republican secrets on TikTok, and Tim Pool was complaining last year he can’t pay the bills. Something’s up in Trump World.

Well, here’s even more proof for you. The Daily Wire, the digital media company founded in 2015 by right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro is crashing and burning right now. They’re laying off a significant chunk of their workforce (after a previous layoff last year) and they’ve lost nearly 90% of their YouTube audience since 2023, according to some estimates I’ve seen. There are some recent videos on Shapiro’s channel that have less than 25,000 views. A pretty massive drop, considering he was averaging millions of views a video barely four years ago. So what gives?

For those who do not follow the right-wing ecosystem, The Daily Wire has always been a bit different from other conservative digital publishers. It was much more focused on appearing like a legitimate news site. I’ve always found them easier to understand as a traditional neocon outlet in MAGA clothing. They invested heavily in Facebook and by the end of the 2010s, they were one of the biggest publishers on the platform. According to the Facebook data from Newswhip my team and I have been tracking month to month since 2023, The Daily Wire basically disappeared from the app around 2023, came back for a brief period during the 2024 election, and then vanished again.

On YouTube, the story is a bit different. Shapiro’s channel, which has always been The Daily Wire’s flagship, started dropping off last fall. Slumping around August, it saw a small bump back to baseline after Charlie Kirk died, and then completely fell off a cliff at the end of October.

Which, when paired with the Facebook traffic data, gives us enough information to put together a fairly definitive picture of what happened. The Daily Wire is actually in a pretty typical digital media death spiral.

Facebook was The Daily Wire’s bread basket from 2018 to around 2022. This also appears to be the peak of their YouTube penetration. They were doing well enough to launch their streaming service DailyWire+ around then, as well. They were pulling in a lot of traffic and, assumedly, a lot of revenue. Though I think it’s safe to assume The Daily Wire, like every other right-wing publisher, was also getting a lot of dark money from pro-Trump organizations and using it to inflate their traffic (we’ll get to that in a sec).

But Facebook traffic started to dry up and then, after a spring 2024 update to the News Feed, was nuked entirely. That same year, tensions between Shapiro and Daily Wire host Candace Owens got so bad they fired her. Owens had been on an especially anti-Semitic tear at the time, which didn’t fly at a company run by Shapiro, who is Orthodox Jewish. But Owens being fired for anti-Semitism was a perfect launchpad for her own YouTube channel, which is now pulling in millions of views a month. Owens has similarly used her close friendship with Kirk to wage a one-woman war against the MAGA establishment since September. And it doesn’t get any more establishment than The Daily Wire.

So not only does The Daily Wire now not have Facebook traffic to fall back on, they also have Owens cannibalizing a huge chunk of their audience, who are hungry for more reactionary content. This isn’t quite a leopards eating my face situation. A closer metaphor would be an oxycodone dealer losing customers to heroin.

Owens is a deeply unreliable narrator, but she claimed this week that the majority of the traffic still going to Shapiro’s videos is completely fake. “He’s been buying views for his main show and you can tell by the comment ratio. (And the fact that I know the person who bought ads-per-view at DW),” she posted on X. Which is actually backed up by what we can see on Google’s Ads Transparency Center. The Daily Wire is running around 40 of Shapiro’s videos as ads at the moment. Ouch.

If you add the amount of money The Daily Wire has lit on fire over the last five years producing Tubi-original right-wing movies no one watches, a floundering streaming app no one is using, and a shrinking roster of relevant pundits to hire, it’s hard to imagine how they could reverse this. Speaking of relevant pundits, there’s also the Israel problem. The MAGA civil war that’s been happening since Kirk died largely boils down to whether or not American conservatives should support Israel or not. Kirk was something of a bridge there. The “cool” new far right, led by figures like Owens and Nick Fuentes are both anti-Israel and blatantly anti-Semitic, while Shapiro, of course, is not. The age old problem with working at the racism factory! They eventually make a new racism that includes you.

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Pulling back the curtain on Wikipedia's Articles for Creation process

There is enormous demand for new Wikipedia articles, especially from brands and startups looking to influence how they appear in search and AI results. But despite the promises of sketchy vendors, getting a new entry published remains extraordinarily difficult.

Lumino's exclusive audit of 1,009 Articles for creation (AfC) submissions offers a rare, data-driven look at how this process actually works. The findings challenge common assumptions about notability and reveal the structural dynamics shaping the encyclopedia's growth and guidelines. 

The full report is here. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, Wikify, to stay updated on the latest Wikipedia developments.

I’ve had some readers asking me about the scientologist speedruns. If you’ve missed this, packs of mostly Gen Z kids are breaking down the doors of various Scientology centers and trying to run as deep into the building as they can. Another speedrun happened over the weekend in New York City.

I’ve seen some conspiracy theories about how these speedruns started and why. And I’ve seen a whole bunch of rumors about why many of the most popular speedrun TikToks are no longer available on the platform. Well, I have a few answers there.

The user claiming credit for the whole trend, @swhileyy, said in a video yesterday that his original video was actually pulled down by TikTok, itself. He said that even though his speedrun videos were getting millions of views, they were all removed by TikTok. @swhileyy claims that The Church Of Scientology was behind the takedown notices, but there’s not a lot of proof to that. btw if you’re wondering what @swhileyy’s deal is, he’s like an obnoxious prank video guy and I think this was all just originally conceived as something that could get a bunch of attention online.

As for why TikTok would be taking the videos down, again, not much of a conspiracy theory. The videos are trespassing (and arguably religious-based harassment) and that is against the app’s terms of service.

And if you’re still scratching head, asking, “why Scientology and why now?” Well, it’s been about 16 years since 4chan’s Project Chanology, where they protested Scientologists, which is just long enough for a new generation to come up with a new way to hassle them.

Told you this was coming, folks. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced a big change coming to Instagram this week that is cracking down on aggregators and going after accounts that don’t add anything to other people’s content. Mosseri said he wants accounts using the collab and reshare tools, rather than just uploading another version of the video.

Mosseri doesn’t say “clipping” in the video, but it’s absolutely clear that’s what this change is meant to deal with. This is what I’ve been arguing for the last few weeks. If enough people figure out an engagement hack it, functionally, becomes a new form of spam. And spam, for most platforms, is the ultimate red line when it comes to moderation.

Speaking of spam…

MrBeast did a stupid engagement hack post over the weekend that now has a million likes. It was obviously a stupid engagement hack post and everyone knew it was. It’s nothing new for MrBeast, it’s his whole deal. Turn money into engagement and turn that engagement into money, repeat.

X’s new head of product, Nikita Bier, posted and then deleted a reply to a post about MrBeast’s likes giveaway, writing, “Not getting paid for this cycle for this bullshit.” And MrBeast replied, writing, “Welp, I’m going back to calling this Twitter.”

Anyways, this is basically a microcosm of how the entire internet works now.

This comes off the back of Pitt actor Isa Briones having to beg her Instagram followers to stop showing up at her Broadway show and shouting stuff at her.

I found this on X and I think it makes a lot of sense. “I think because [The Pitt] is so technical and they don’t get into the nitty gritty of the relationship drama,” X user @kitdoesitbest wrote. “These people are just making shit up! They want what the show isn’t going to provide them.”

Even more interesting, this theory kind of works for every bad fandom. Basically, if a parasocial fandom forms around a work of fiction — or a band or a creator or a podcast or whatever — but it doesn’t have enough to sustain that fandom, the fans will fill in the blanks. This would, for instance, explain the deep and completely unintelligible lore K-Pop fans concoct around like two members’ hands grazing each other.

So The Pitt, which tells viewers essentially nothing about the characters’ non-work lives, is now managing a very vocal fandom that has created an entirely different show that episodes need to live up to now. And every new episode that doesn’t fit into the collective headcanon only makes the fans angrier and more unruly.

I’ve asked this question before, but, genuinely, how do you pump the brakes on this sort of thing? Is this just going to be something anyone making anything has to worry about forever now?

P.S. here’s the quickpilled brown fox vibemogs lazy chud dogcel by jumpmaxxing.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***