Why Are Republicans Better at Making Money on the Internet?

There have been three great beneficiaries of the attention economy. First and second were Facebook and Google, both of which have built some of the most incredible businesses of all time. Weirdly, many other consumer brands playing in the same arena have struggled. Just in the past few months, Vice, Gawker, BuzzFeed, IRL, BeReal, and Clubhouse have all struggled to capture some of that sweet eyeball-associated revenue. 

Even more interesting is the third group of beneficiaries: Right-wing publications have thrived. 

The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s Nashville-based outfit, has over 1M paying subscribers, and is estimated to have pulled in over $200M in revenue in 2022. Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who said that the elementary school shooting in Sandy Hook was a hoax, pulled in $165M over three years selling supplements. And there are many others! The Drudge Report is a one-man money-making machine. Rumble has emerged as a legitimate competitor to YouTube with real revenue/users. Depending on your bent, Twitter may even qualify as one of these companies now too. 

What matters is that, from a business perspective, these businesses have succeeded while utilizing the same playbook. They had similar technology. They had similar tools. They even have somewhat similar traffic:

But they have had wildly different outcomes. Despite BuzzFeed (which also owns huffpost.com) having nearly 6x the traffic, Daily Wire makes 50% of BuzzFeed’s revenue. So what happened?