GOP media battler Dan Bongino has made good on his plans to create a news site that would be more like the Drudge Report than the real Drudge Report. And it almost imploded his server.
Bongino, who hosts a widely subscribed Dan Bongino Show podcast, had 20,000 users on his site just an hour after it went live on Wednesday. “Interest has been through the roof,” he said of the Bongino Report.
Like Drudge, it aggregates stories, especially those of interest to conservatives. Unlike Drudge, it generally won’t pick up stories from sources critics dub “fake news,” such as the New York Times or CNN.
The Bongino Report, refreshingly reliable and solid, for Liberty-loving patriots. https://t.co/8TwIToGEza
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) December 5, 2019
Bongino started the site because he felt that in recent months, Drudge has highlighted too many anti-Trump stories he believes aren’t true. It’s a complaint also heard in the White House.
But he doesn’t call his page a competitor or Drudge challenger. “I am not competing with anybody. I wish them all the best,” he said.
“I don’t want to steal Drudge’s thing,” he told me. “I have an agenda: Freedom and liberty. It’s no more complicated than that.”
He’s not the only news aggregator in the alternative Drudge space.
Citizen Free Press is already the New Drudge Reporthttps://t.co/OSZ71JQ0Ch
Run by a former Lou Dobbs producer…
We get more than 600,000 hits every day.
15 million pageviews per month.
Good luck, Dan. pic.twitter.com/WaVL52fdQo
— Citizen Free Press (@TheDailyBail) December 4, 2019
Notably, Citizen Free Press has exploded in traffic recently.
Founder “Citizen Kane,” told us, “CFP started the year averaging 100,000 page views per day, and now we can hit 600,000 on a good day, and still virtually no one knows about Citizen Free Press.” He said he receives 15 million page views a month compared to Drudge’s 500 million, according to Quantcast.
And while Bongino has a long list of media friends helping to spread the word, Citizen Free Press is a one-man band with no advertising or publicity, just like Matt Drudge when he started.
The Bongino Report looks like a modern news site, well designed with a special feature that shows shadow headlines on many stories. Citizen Free Press has taken Drudge’s old school look to an extreme and stands apart with edgy headlines.
But unlike Bongino, CFP is a direct challenge to Drudge.
“Matt Drudge has worn out his welcome with conservatives and Trump voters alike,” said the founder.
“Citizen Free Press was founded two years ago and has benefited greatly from the shift away from Drudge,” he said, adding, “We welcome super Dan Bongino to the space and wish him much success. We’re all on the same team, trying to provide conservative news junkies with their daily fix of truth they won’t hear anywhere in the anti-Trump media industrial complex.”
