Conservatives hunt for their own social network

There has been a big uptick in traffic to conservative social media networks like Parler, thedonald.win and Gab over the past few months, according to data from SimilarWeb.

Why it matters: Conservatives are looking to build their own social media platforms, where they can escape from what they feel is baseless censorship of their viewpoints from mainstream social media networks.

The big picture: While some of these apps are experiencing big traffic growth, they still pale in comparison to the size of companies like Facebook, where conservative publishers like Ben Shapiro still have deep-rooted networks and loyal followings.

As of last week, nearly all of the major social media platforms have taken action on accounts belonging to President Trump, his supporters and the alt-right.

• Those actions prompted calls by conservative lawmakers to ditch traditional social media for new platforms like Parler.
• As a result, parler.com's average daily traffic skyrocketed by 741.5% in just four days from June 24-28.

By the numbers: Since its start in 2018, parler.com has had several periods of peaking traffic, with a notable peak occurring in June of 2019, when it was reported that there were nearly 200,000 new users, many from Saudi Arabia, who were leaving Twitter because of its censorship policies.

• However, the most notable peak was this past June, when visits to the site were 2.834M, up 518.5% from May.