Breitbart Audience Steady at 83 Million

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 30, 8:35AM EDT

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Among all the turmoil about advertisers fleeing conservative website Breitbart and the return of its former chairman, Steve Bannon, from his role in the White House, the site’s traffic has stayed steady above 80 million visits a month. That means Breitbart runs among the larger “news” sites on the web, but hardly the largest.

According to industry measurement company SimilarWeb, Breitbart had 83 million visitors in August, up from 78.7 million in July, but down from a six-month high of 92.3 million set in March. The average amount of time people spent on the site during a visit was 3:34 minutes, a good number for most news sites. The average pageviews per visit yielded a modest 2.32.

Among larger news sites, visitors to The New York Times spend 3:03 minutes on the site, and averaged 2.43 pageviews. CNN visitors average 3:51 minutes and 2.3 pageviews by the same measure. Drudge Report’s numbers were better than any large news site in August — much better. Drudge visitors averaged 22:31 minutes per visit and 9:54 pageviews. A key difference between Drudge and the other large news sites is that its headlines link out to other sites, while the headlines of most sites link to other pages of their own.

Breitbart’s largest challenge, after drawing a large audience, is revenue. The site is so controversial and Bannon such a polarizing figure that even if the site grows, advertisers probably will not return. Audience will be a sign of influence, but not revenue potential.

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Among Breitbart’s owners is the extremely wealthy and conservative family, the Mercers. Head of the family, Robert Mercer, is a computer scientist. More important from the standpoint of his fortune, he is among the founders of one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Renaissance Technologies.

Bannon’s return may balloon the Breitbart audience because he is so visible. September numbers will be out in a few weeks and will show if he has given the audience any bump in size. The site still will have the challenge of lack of revenue. However, if size is a measure of influence and Breitbart keeps its wealthy backers, the money problem may never be an issue.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.