Breitbart News Statistics 2026 | History, Founder, Owner, Headquarters, Offices, Traffic & Facts

Breitbart News Statistics 2026 show the site ranked #2,989 globally and #37 among US News & Media Publishers, drawing an estimated 24.3 million visits over the trailing three months with a global rank that has fluctuated between roughly 2,800 and 2,989 since June 2026. The site was founded in 2007 by Andrew Breitbart, is headquartered in Los Angeles, and is now co-owned by CEO Larry Solov, Susie Breitbart, and the Mercer family.

Breitbart News in 2026

Breitbart News enters its third decade in 2026 as a far-right American news and opinion outlet that has cycled through dramatic swings in traffic, ownership structure, and political influence since Andrew Breitbart launched it. The site’s monthly readership tells the story on its own: it peaked at 17.3 million monthly readers at the start of 2017, collapsed to 4.6 million by May 2019, and bottomed out near 700,000 by October 2024, before a modest 2025-2026 rebound tied to renewed Trump-era relevance. Similarweb’s most recent data puts total visits at roughly 24.3 million over the trailing three months as of September 2026, placing Breitbart at global rank #2,989 and #37 among US News & Media Publishers.

Breitbart News Statistics for 2026 reflect a site that has settled into a smaller, older, more male-skewing niche than its mid-2010s peak. According to Similarweb, its audience is 69.14% male and 30.86% female, with the largest single age bracket being 65 and older. The company remains headquartered in Los Angeles, California, with bureaus that have historically included Texas, London, and Jerusalem, and it operates under private ownership split between co-founder and CEO Larry Solov, Andrew Breitbart’s widow Susie Breitbart, and the Mercer family, longtime conservative megadonors who have backed the site financially since 2011.

Interesting Facts

Source: Similarweb traffic analytics, September 2026; Wikipedia, Breitbart News; The Washington Post, “Whatever happened to Breitbart?”; Politico, “Trump’s back — and so is Breitbart.”

The gap between Breitbart’s 17.3 million monthly readers in early 2017 and its roughly 700,000 by October 2024 represents a decline of nearly 96% over seven and a half years — one of the steepest sustained traffic collapses of any major American political media outlet in the digital era. That drop tracks closely with two documented forces: an advertiser boycott campaign organized by the anonymous group Sleeping Giants that saw more than 2,200 organizations commit to pulling ads from the site by mid-2017, and a broader erosion of the alt-right media ecosystem that had briefly propelled Breitbart to national prominence during the 2016 election cycle.

The 2025-2026 partial rebound, reflected in Similarweb’s 24.3 million three-month visit total, coincides with Donald Trump’s return to the White House and a renewed news cycle favorable to Breitbart’s editorial focus. Even so, the site’s #2,989 global rank and #37 US News & Media rank place it well behind ideological competitors like Fox News, and only modestly ahead of smaller right-leaning outlets such as the Daily Caller and Newsmax in overall traffic share, according to Similarweb’s competitor analysis.

Breitbart News Founding and History Statistics 2026

Source: Wikipedia, Breitbart News; The Hollywood Reporter, “Breitbart News Names Executives Who Will Run Company in Wake of Founder’s Death.”

Andrew Breitbart’s original vision was explicitly framed as “the Huffington Post of the right,” a description that came directly from Steve Bannon, who later ran the outlet. That framing makes sense given Breitbart’s own history: he had co-founded HuffPost itself in the mid-2000s before splitting off to build a conservative counterweight, first as a news-aggregation site in 2005 and then as a more editorially distinct operation once Breitbart.tv launched in 2007, which most official records treat as the company’s founding year.

The funding structure behind Breitbart’s early expansion reveals how modestly the operation started and how quickly outside capital reshaped it. BigGovernment.com launched in 2009 on nothing more than a $25,000 loan from Breitbart’s own father, yet within two years hedge fund manager Robert Mercer had injected at least $11 million, transforming a scrappy blog network into a well-capitalized media operation capable of the rapid geographic expansion that followed — Texas and London bureaus in 2014, then Jerusalem in 2015, each opened roughly 90 days apart as part of a stated plan for continuous regional growth.

Breitbart News Ownership and Leadership Statistics 2026

Source: Politico, “Breitbart reveals owners: CEO Larry Solov, the Mercer family and Susie Breitbart”; Wikipedia, Breitbart News; Larry Solov Wikipedia entry.

Larry Solov’s path to running Breitbart illustrates how personal the company’s leadership has remained. A childhood friend of Andrew Breitbart, Solov earned a religious studies degree from Stanford in 1990 and a law degree from UCLA in 1994 before serving as the company’s general counsel starting in 2007. When Breitbart died suddenly in March 2012, Solov stepped into the CEO role and has run the company for over a decade since, making him by far the longest-serving chief executive in Breitbart’s history — longer than founder Andrew Breitbart himself led the company.

Steve Bannon’s tenure as executive chairman, by contrast, was intermittent and ultimately shorter than his public profile might suggest: he held the role from 2012 until stepping down in August 2016 to run Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, briefly returned to the position the same day he was dismissed as White House Chief Strategist in August 2017, then departed for good in January 2018. That makes Bannon’s total time atop Breitbart roughly four and a half years out of the company’s now nearly 19-year existence, despite his outsized association with the brand’s political identity. Coverage of how conservative media figures navigate White House relationships in 2026 is examined further in our report on White House press access statistics, which tracks which outlets currently hold official access credentials.

Breitbart News Traffic Statistics 2026

Source: Similarweb, breitbart.com Traffic Analytics, September 2026.

Breitbart’s traffic mix in 2026 tells a very different story from its early-2017 peak, when much of its growth came from viral social sharing during a high-intensity presidential campaign. Today, direct traffic accounts for 83.25% of desktop visits, meaning the overwhelming majority of Breitbart’s remaining audience arrives by typing the URL directly or via bookmarks, rather than discovering content through search engines or social platforms. That pattern is consistent with a smaller, more loyal, more habitual readership rather than a broad, algorithmically-amplified one, and it helps explain why the site’s monthly total-visit figures have stabilized in the tens of millions rather than continuing to erode toward zero.

The -8.51% month-over-month decline recorded most recently, combined with a global rank that moved from roughly 2,800 to 2,989 over the trailing three months, suggests continued gradual softening rather than a dramatic new collapse or resurgence. A 46.14% bounce rate and 4 minutes 34 seconds average visit duration are both fairly typical for a politically engaged news readership, indicating that visitors who do arrive tend to read multiple articles per session rather than leaving immediately — a healthier engagement pattern than the site’s raw traffic decline alone might suggest.

Breitbart News Audience Demographics Statistics 2026

Source: Similarweb, breitbart.com Website Traffic Demographics, September 2026.

The 69.14% male skew in Breitbart’s audience is notably more lopsided than most mainstream US news outlets, which typically run closer to an even split or a modest male lean. Combined with 65-and-older being the single largest age bracket, the data paints a picture of an audience that has aged alongside the site itself since its 2016-2017 heyday, rather than one that has been actively replenished with younger readers over the past decade — a demographic trend shared by several legacy partisan outlets navigating the broader shift toward video and social-native news consumption documented across the US media landscape.

Geographic concentration reinforces the picture of a domestically focused, aging readership: nearly 92% of all traffic originates in the United States, with Canada and the United Kingdom trailing far behind in the single digits. This is a meaningfully more US-concentrated audience than Breitbart’s mid-2010s profile, when its London and Jerusalem bureaus were actively courting international readership as part of Bannon-era plans for a “pan-European nationalist” media footprint — an ambition that traffic data suggests never fully materialized at scale outside the United States.

Breitbart News Competitor and Market Position Statistics 2026

Source: Similarweb, breitbart.com Competitors & Similar Sites, September 2026.

Fox News registers a perfect 100% affinity score as Breitbart’s closest competitor, which is unsurprising given both outlets target overlapping conservative audiences, yet the scale gap between them remains enormous: Fox News sits at category rank #17 compared to Breitbart’s #37, and Fox’s overall traffic dwarfs Breitbart’s by roughly an order of magnitude, consistent with historical patterns dating back to 2016 when Fox routinely drew roughly ten times Breitbart’s unique visitor count. That gap has structurally defined Breitbart’s market position for its entire existence — a persistently significant but clearly secondary player in conservative digital media, never approaching Fox’s dominance despite periods of outsized political influence.

Breitbart’s ranking relative to smaller, newer competitors is also revealing. Newsmax at #412 and the Daily Wire at #795 both rank considerably lower than Breitbart in absolute category position despite drawing meaningful conservative audiences, while Gateway Pundit (#335) and OANN (#2,652) occupy adjacent niches further down the conservative media long tail. This positions Breitbart in 2026 as a mid-tier but still relevant player: well behind the Fox News-scale outlets, but still ahead of most further-right, lower-traffic competitors, a status confirmed by ongoing comparisons to network television coverage patterns tracked in our broader report on TV ratings statistics in the US, which similarly shows Fox’s outsized dominance over cable news rivals.

Breitbart News Controversies and Content Statistics 2026

Source: Wikipedia, Breitbart News; Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, 2017 study; Simmons Research, October 2018 survey.

The advertiser exodus of 2017 stands as the single most consequential business event in Breitbart’s history, directly preceding the collapse from 17.3 million to 4.6 million monthly readers documented earlier. Losing roughly 90% of advertisers within a three-month window between April and June 2017 stripped the site of the ad-revenue base the Los Angeles Times described as vital to its self-supporting business model, forcing a greater reliance on the Mercer family’s continued financial backing and on lower-cost affiliate and native advertising arrangements in the years that followed.

Wikipedia’s decision to deprecate Breitbart as a reliable source in September 2018 — placing it alongside a short list of publications editors are instructed not to cite as factual sources, while still permitting citation as an opinion source — represents one of the clearest institutional judgments on the site’s content standards, and it followed years of documented factual errors and retracted stories spanning the Loretta Lynch misidentification in 2014, the false Dortmund riot story in 2017, and the debunked illegal-immigrant wildfire-arrest claim from the same year. That reputational trajectory sits alongside Breitbart’s continued commercial relevance, illustrated by the site’s role in amplifying stories that shaped national political conversations during both the 2016 and 2024 election cycles, a dynamic tracked in real time by outlets like our own coverage of the Republican Midterm Convention viewership statistics, which similarly measures how conservative media audiences respond to major political programming.

Frequently Asked Questions About Breitbart News 2026

Who founded Breitbart News?

Andrew Breitbart founded the site, launching it as a news aggregator in 2005 before it evolved into Breitbart News Network by 2007. He died on March 1, 2012, at age 43.

Who owns Breitbart News now?

Breitbart is privately owned by CEO Larry Solov, Susie Breitbart (Andrew Breitbart’s widow), and the Mercer family, who have been major financial backers since 2011.

Where is Breitbart News headquartered?

Breitbart is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. The company has historically operated bureaus in Texas, London, and Jerusalem.

How much traffic does Breitbart News get in 2026?

According to Similarweb data from September 2026, Breitbart draws approximately 24.3 million visits over a trailing three-month period, ranking #2,989 globally and #37 among US News & Media Publishers.

How has Breitbart’s readership changed since 2017?

Breitbart’s monthly readership fell from a peak of 17.3 million at the start of 2017 to 4.6 million by May 2019, and further to approximately 700,000 by October 2024 — a decline of nearly 96% — before a modest rebound in 2025-2026.

Is Steve Bannon still involved with Breitbart News?

No. Steve Bannon served as executive chairman from 2012 to 2016, briefly returned in August 2017, and permanently stepped down in January 2018.

What caused Breitbart’s major traffic decline?

An advertiser boycott campaign organized by the group Sleeping Giants led to more than 2,200 organizations pledging to stop advertising on Breitbart by mid-2017, contributing to the loss of roughly 90% of its advertisers in just three months.

Is Breitbart News considered a reliable source?

Wikipedia editors deprecated Breitbart News as a source in September 2018 due to concerns over reliability, meaning it can still be cited as an opinion or commentary source on the platform but not as a factual reference.

What is Breitbart’s audience demographic?

Breitbart’s audience is 69.14% male and 30.86% female, according to Similarweb, with the largest single age group being 65 and older.

How does Breitbart compare to Fox News in traffic?

Fox News is Breitbart’s closest competitor by audience affinity (100% affinity score) but ranks far higher in traffic, at category rank #17 compared to Breitbart’s #37, consistent with a scale gap dating back to at least 2016.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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