Washington: Conservative media outlet Newsmax has enjoyed a massive surge in followers across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube over the past month.
Rising social media subscribers, viewers and interactions trends continued this weekend after the outlet’s content was again amplified by President Donald Trump, who has turned on Fox News in recent weeks, broadly citing its coverage about his election defeat.
On Saturday, Trump tweeted that Fox was “virtually unwatchable” and pointed his vast Twitter following in the direction of Newsmax and the One America News Network (OANN), another outlet sympathetic to the president.
For Newsmax, a long-running media endeavor overseen by a Trump confidant named Christopher Ruddy, the high-profile endorsements appear to be paying off.
According to data from analytics platform Social Blade, which tracks the daily shifts of profiles, “likes” on the Newsmax Facebook page have spiked by over 1.4 million in the past 30 days, with a daily average rise of 47,241. On Saturday, when the channel was talked about by Trump, its Facebook page attracted over 30,000 new likes.
The pattern was echoed on Twitter, where its account gained 563,735 new followers in the past 30 days. It amassed 27,105 new fans Saturday.
On YouTube, Newsmax brought in 1.18 million new subscribers over the past 30 days, a daily average rise of nearly 40,000. Video views on the platform rose by 108 million in the past 30 days, according to Social Blade.
Ruddy previously said Trump’s election was a big opportunity for Newsmax because he was “raising questions about the mainstream media,” CNN reported in 2017.
In the wake of Trump’s election defeat to Joe Biden, Newsmax continued to uncritically cover Trump’s baseless accusations of voter fraud.
Ruddy told The New Yorker in an interview published earlier this month that his business has an “editorial policy of being supportive of the president and his policies,” but insisted that Newsmax coverage has overall been “very balanced and fair.”
The president’s relationship with Fox News appeared to deteriorate this month after the network was first to project that Biden had won the state of Arizona. Trump tweeted on November 12 that the channel’s daytime ratings had “completely collapsed.”
