Most major conservative news apps have seen little to no growth in monthly traffic or app downloads over the past one to two years, according to data from Apptopia and Similarweb.

Why it matters: The splintering of the MAGA media movement — combined with broader media market challenges — has impacted the ability of many outlets within the once-unified coalition to grow.

📉 Zoom in: Over the past two years, monthly app downloads to several of the most popular conservative media apps, including Truth Social and Newsmax, have declined, per Apptopia.

• Several of those apps, including Daily Wire and The Blaze, have seen app downloads decline in line with website traffic decreases, per Similarweb data pulled by Howard Polskin, author of the conservative media analysis blog TheRighting.
• Every conservative media site monitored by TheRighting saw web traffic decreases in November compared to the year prior, except Truth Social, which grew 5%.

To be fair, some of those traffic declines are consistent with the broader news ecosystem, which has struggled to reach pandemic levels of engagement.

• Market challenges, like the decline of link referrals from social media sites, are impacting all publishers, not just conservative sites.

💸 Reality check: The MAGA media universe, unlike mainstream media that it looks to challenge, is made up of many smaller outlets and individuals that — with the exception of Fox News — don't have the same resources to invest in new technology and growth strategies.

• For years leading up to President Trump's second term, that scrappiness proved helpful in collectively extending the movement's unified reach on social media.
• But today, it's become clear that the constellation of disparate voices, preaching conflicting messages, aren't as powerful as they once were in uniting the party.
• That weakness became especially clear last year when a new feature on X revealed that many purported MAGA fans with thousands of followers are seemingly being run from outside the U.S.

🍂 Between the lines: The explosion of right-wing social discourse apps following the Jan. 6 Capitol siege five years ago also seems to have faded.

• There was not enough consistent download data to be able to chart the growth of apps like Gettr and Parler, per Apptopia.
• Parler, which has changed hands several times over the past few years, has initiated a private placement to raise up to $50 million for a possible IPO late this year or early next, it says.

Zoom out: Besides Fox News, which is part of Fox Corp., publicly traded MAGA media stocks have struggled to gain the attention of Wall Street investors.

• Shares in Rumble have declined 58% since their all-time highs in December 2024, when the company announced a $775 million investment from the financial tech firm Tether.
• Shares in Truth Social parent Trump Media & Technology Group are down 61% over the past year.

🔮 Of note: App and traffic data, while helpful in showing some of the challenges conservative publishers face growing their audiences in the second Trump era, don't always paint a full picture.

• Some right-wing personalities are finding success growing their reach and with podcasts and on social media.
• Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have seen notable gains over the past year, per TheRighting, as have some of the Daily Wire podcasts.
• "The Charlie Kirk Show" saw huge gains following the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September.
• Other conservative podcasters, including Bill O'Reilly, Mark Levin and Jordan Peterson, saw little to no growth between the second and third quarters of 2025.

The big picture: Over the past year, infighting between major right-wing media personalities over issues like the Israel-Gaza war, the release of the Epstein files, hate speech and military engagement in Venezuela has fractured the MAGA media coalition, making it challenging for a unified message to reach all corners of the party.

The bottom line: Without a unified message, the many smaller, disparate voices within the movement are struggling to collectively grow.

Comcast yesterday completed the spinoff of its cable networks, now renamed Versant Media, and then watched the new company's stock plunge more than 13%.

Why it matters: Versant's value could impact the takeover battle for Warner Bros. Discovery, which later this week is expected to reiterate its preference for Netflix over Paramount, a source familiar with the situation told Axios.

📺 Catch up quick: Netflix agreed to buy the studio and streaming assets of WBD for $27.75 per share, with WBD then to spin out its cable networks into an independent company.

• Paramount has launched a $30 per share hostile bid for all of WBD, including the cable networks, and extended its tender offer deadline from Jan. 8 to Jan. 21.

💰 Zoom in: Paramount is offering approximately $5.6 billion more than Netflix's agreement, which therefore could be the tipping point for WBD shareholders.

• If WBD shareholders believe the cable networks are worth less, then they should tender their shares to Paramount.
• If they believe the WBD cable networks are worth more, then they should stick with Netflix.
• That's where Versant comes in, because it's the best directional comparison.

💵 By the numbers: Paramount has said it believes WBD cable networks are worth $1 per share, or around $2.5 billion total.

• Wall Street analysts have argued that WBD's cable networks should be worth around $10 billion.
• That number also is just a hair above what Starz appears to have valued the assets during WBD's solicitation process, assuming that it valued the studio/streaming business similarly to Netflix.

The bottom line: Some Wall Street analysts may have overpriced Versant, based on the stock dip.

• WBD shareholders won't make decisions based on one day of trading, but a sustained Versant slump could discourage belief in the prevailing valuation math.

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Venezuela's National Union of Press Workers said yesterday 14 journalists and press workers were detained in Caracas during the installation session of a new National Assembly following the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

• The vast majority of those journalists (13) were from international outlets. Most were eventually released.

⛓ Why it matters: The uncertainty around who will take over the country has press freedom groups worried about the fate of the nearly two dozen journalists detained by the Maduro regime over the years and are still being held.

• "Venezuelan authorities must immediately release all detained journalists and ensure that the press can work freely, without intimidation, retaliation, or obstruction," said José Zamora, regional director of the Americas for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
• "Journalists engaged in newsgathering are civilians, and international law protects the work of reporting the news," the National Press Club said in a statement this morning.
• "Detaining or intimidating reporters for covering events of public interest violates core press freedom principles and deprives the public of critical information."

The big picture: Venezuela has one of the worst press freedom records in the world, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), ranking 160 of 180 countries ranked annually by the nonprofit.

🏛️ Zoom in: Since Maduro rose to power in 2013, his regime has worked to systematically rein in the independent press, essentially creating a government-run media ecosystem.

• One of his most effective tools for reining in the press has been the 2017 passage of an "anti-hate" law that has sanctioned more than a dozen journalists, per RSF.
• Maduro's executive control over the government's judicial and legislative branches has made due process challenging for journalists accused of breaking the law.

📰 Startling stat: During his time in power, dozens of Venezuelan newspapers went out of circulation and at least 285 radio broadcasters shut down amid government pressure that threatened editorial independence and broadcast licenses.

Major live TV events saw a notable ratings uptick in 2025, underscoring how much audiences are craving communal, real-time experiences as their day-to-day viewing habits become more fragmented.

Why it matters: The pandemic shift to streaming drove historic low TV ratings for live events that have mostly started to rebound, but only a few have managed to set new records.

🎆 The latest: ABC said its "Dick Clark's New Years Rockin' Eve" hit a four-year ratings high, with average viewers up roughly 5% from last year's broadcast.

• 🎄 Netflix said its NFL Christmas Gameday broadcast of the Lions-Vikings matchup was the most-streamed NFL game in history.

Other notable milestones: Fox's Super Bowl LIX broadcast in February drew a whopping 127.7 million viewers, according to Nielsen, making it the most-watched Super Bowl and U.S. telecast of all time.

• 🦃 NBC's airing of the 99th annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade reached 34.3 million viewers across NBC and Peacock, its biggest combined audience on record.
• 🏈 Nearly 45 million people watched the three Thanksgiving Day NFL games on average last year, per Nielsen, shattering 2024's record of 34.5 million viewers.

Between the lines: Ratings for award shows and other major sporting events have seen strong growth compared to previous years, but many remain well below their former highs.

• 🏆 Ratings for the Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes and Tonys all saw notable upticks last year. But no award show has been able to come close to the viewership highs from the 2010s.
• ⚾️ More than 27 million people in the U.S. tuned into the final game of the MLB World Series on Fox in November, boosting the overall ratings across the seven-game series to more than 16 million U.S. viewers — its largest audience since 2016.

The big picture: After years of splintering media habits and content overload, people are not only tuning into moments that bring them together but also showing up in person.

• 🎉 The U.S. Open set an all-time attendance record in 2025 of more than 1.1 million fans over three weeks. MLB attendance exceeded 71 million, an increase for the third consecutive season. WNBA had a single-season attendance record.
• 🎤 Live Nation reported record revenue of $8.5 billion for the third quarter and is on track for its biggest year yet
• 🎟️ Social media influencers, podcasters and authors sold nearly 500% more tickets last year compared with 2024, according to StubHub.

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Traffic to top websites has fallen by more than 11% in the past five years, according to data from Similarweb — a clear sign of the challenges traditional publishers face in the AI era.

Why it matters: Internet usage and adoption continue to grow, but older websites are struggling to keep up as newer AI-driven experiences start to dominate user attention.

• Data shows that those older sites don't just magically disappear. They continue to rot on the open web for years, clouding search results and leaving behind trails of broken or outdated links.

📊 By the numbers: Taking a look at aggregate web traffic globally to the top 1,000 websites — including newer ones — internet traffic has held steady over the past five years at around 300 billion average monthly web visits, per Similarweb.

• There's even been some modest growth, with that cohort rising 1.8% between November 2024 and November 2025.
• But if you remove websites that didn't exist five years ago, traffic declined 1.6%. (That doesn't include the few sites that have disappeared altogether.)

🤖 Zoom out: The slow downfall of older websites has left the internet muddled for users and scrapers trying to gather data to accurately train large language models.

• While some publishers have pushed to maintain and update their web experiences, many have instead neglected their old websites.

• A study from Pew Research Center found that a quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.
• 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites.

⛓️‍💥 The big picture: Premium publishers have argued for years that AI firms scraping their content could inevitably put them out of business, leaving LLMs with nothing to train on besides outdated content.

• Data shows that AI chatbot referral traffic to top media and news websites is roughly 96% lower than traditional Google search.

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The 2025 North American box office fell short of the $9 billion analysts projected heading into the year, thanks to underperforming sequels and superhero movies that led to an especially weak summer and fall season.

Why it matters: Domestic entertainment tends to do well amid inflation and economic uncertainty, as people pull back from pricier international travel. But while concerts and theme parks boomed in the U.S. last year, theaters struggled — signaling the box office business faces unique challenges.

🍿 By the numbers: The domestic box office brought in roughly $8.6 billion last year, slightly above 2024's haul but down 3% from 2023 and down significantly (27% and 24%) from pre-pandemic highs of $11.9 billion and $11.4 billion in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

• As was the case in 2024, PG-rated films dominated ticket sales, with family-friendly animation attracting larger group sales compared to dramas, horror and gorier action films.
• 2025's top performer domestically was "A Minecraft Movie," setting records in April as the biggest box office debut for a video game adaptation.
• Disney's "Zootopia 2," which released around Thanksgiving, is now Disney Animation's highest grossing movie ever, having crossed $1.46 billion at the global box office.

🦸‍♂️ Between the lines: Despite a few hits like "Lilo & Stitch" and "Superman," a sluggish summer and fall dragged down overall results.

• The domestic summer box office, which extends from May to Labor Day, brought in roughly $3.67 billion in sales last year, per Comscore, marking one of the worst summer showings in decades — excluding the pandemic.

🎞️ Zoom out: The weaker overall turnout, combined with ongoing studio consolidation, has Hollywood heavyweights worried about the future of domestic film production.

🎬 What to watch: President Trump has twice threatened to impose a 100% tariff on foreign-made movies. But Hollywood lobbyists say the threat feels empty, as historically services have been impossible to tax.

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During President Trump's first term, at least 20 Trump-related books hit the top spot on the New York Times Best Sellers list. But now, the Trump-book bubble has burst, according to a new report from Paul Farhi for The Atlantic.

📚 Why it matters: Reader fatigue has set in. We're more desensitized to the twists and turns of Trump's leadership style.

• "This time around, Trump's team seems united, his offensive outbursts are made in public, and the crazy plans aren't averted. There may just be less for the chroniclers to reveal," Farhi notes.

🫏 State of play: Books explaining the demise of the Democrats in 2024 continue to flourish.

• "Original Sin," by Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson, about Joe Biden's physical and cognitive decline, was a bestseller for much of the summer.
• Kamala Harris' memoir about the 2024 election, "107 Days," is still on the chart after three months, per Farhi.