There was a time, not very long ago, when Ben Shapiro could reasonably call himself the king of all conservative media.
In 2020, as Drew Harwell at the Washington Post notes, Shapiro’s media company, the Daily Wire, “ranked as Facebook’s top English-language publisher for three straight months. Its sarcastic news items on then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s salon visits gained millions more views than the websites of Fox News, CNN and the New York Times.” Shapiro himself was ubiquitous, a right-wing star who had risen to fame before Donald Trump and seamlessly adapted to the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. He was a digital battering ram against the Democrats and the progressive left. He seemed guaranteed, like Fox itself, for an indefinite run at the top of the media heap.
That’s all over now. The Daily Wire is instituting significant layoffs. Its website has emerged as one of the great traffic losers in conservative media. Meanwhile, the company has seen its subscriber base on YouTube starting to shrink. There are Daily Wire YouTube videos that now, after a few days online, have less than 10,000 views, a catastrophically small number for a channel with more than 3 million subscribers. The top comments all mock the low view counts.
If a variety of poor business decisions can be blamed, in part, for the Daily Wire’s downfall — ill-fated investments in feature films, an epic fantasy series, and peculiar merchandise — the greater story is the collapse of Shapiro’s constituency, especially among the young media consumers who once fueled the Daily Wire’s runaway growth.
