In the how do we look more stupid department, Vice News did a video shoot following around Mathew Boyle and some intrepid reporters true believers from Breitbart such as Milo Yiannopoulos. The result is Breitbart puffing themselves up to make themselves look really important. Mathew Boyle also attempts to claim his reporter bones from getting a shout out from Donald Trump in February, and also trying to show that Breitbart received 150 million page views in June which is splattered across the video below, and so because of those numbers they must be doing something right.

However, according to analytics at Similar Web, Breitbart.com only does an average of between 26 and 40 million page views per month in the last 6 months. Of course that is nothing to sneeze at either. But numerous right wing websites these days, DrudgeReport included, pad their page view numbers by auto refreshing their sites every 30 seconds, so that  does ad up to additional page views that are not really real numbers, but padded numbers instead. While Breitbart doesnt use auto refresh, they are not really disclosing real numbers to their site to the general public. As for Drudgereport, Just hang out on that site for a minute or two to see the refresh effect. As for traffic numbers, SimilarWeb shows that Breitbart’s numbers are out of kilter to Breitbart’s claims.

If one studies traffic numbers from Breitbart, one can quickly see where most of their traffic comes from, which in this case is Facebook. Facebook recently changed their news feeds to get rid of numerous newsy sites that overpopulate users news feeds, so that in the coming days weeks and months, users will go back to seeing their family and friends feeds, and newsy looking feeds will all but be banned from the site. Thus if Breitbart is counting on future traffic numbers from Facebook, they will be surely upset down the road, as most publishers will be when it comes to gaining traffic numbers from Facebook.

If you are interested in what auto refresh looks like at Drudge:

var timer = setInterval(“autoRefresh()”, 1000 * 60 * 3);
function autoRefresh(){self.location.reload(true);}

So when one looks at sites for actual page views, one needs to realize that traffic numbers are easily manipulated. Drudge of course has huge numbers and there is no disputing it. However when you reload your page every few seconds it just adds up page views over time. As for Breitbart, they use Quantcast to measure traffic numbers to their site, but when one goes to search for their numbers at Quantcast, one is met with “They do not share their traffic numbers to the public” so it’s pretty much impossible to see what the actual numbers are, which leads to “it is whatever they say it is.”

Suffice it to say however there are numerous tools one can use to manipulate traffic data, whether Breitbart will ever end up disclosing their actual numbers remains to be seen, especially since SimilarWeb shows numbers that are not even close to Breitbart’s claims.

By Marcus Crassus

Marcus Licinius Crassus was a Roman general and politician who played a key role in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.

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