Six months ago, Breitbart was riding the wave of the election, plotting an international expansion to provide a platform to spread far-right, populist views in Europe. But today, Breitbart is facing traffic declines, advertiser blacklists, campaigns for marketers to steer clear and even a petition within Amazon for it to stop providing ad services.
There were just 26 brands appearing on Breitbart in May, down from a high of 242 in March, according to MediaRadar, which tracks ads on websites. Many conservative sites, including Townhall, The Blaze and National Review, have also had declines, although those declines are much less pronounced than Breitbart, according to MediaRadar.
Traffic numbers tell another part of the story. Breitbart had 10.8 million uniques in April, down 13 percent from a year ago, according to comScore. (However, many news sites peaked after Donald Trump’s inauguration and have seen audience decline since then; Breitbart was 67th among news/information sites in April, little unchanged from a year ago when it was 62nd.)
Daily Archives: June 7, 2017
The problem with immigration quotas
From Tim Hartford:
Unexpected definitions can affect targets as well as trends. In the UK, the most notorious target is the one that keeps being missed: a promise to keep net migration under 100,000. In 2010 the then prime minister David Cameron challenged voters to kick him out if he missed the target. He did, and in a way, so did they. Encouraged by six years of failure to hit the target as home secretary, Theresa May has, now as prime minister, renewed the promise again.
How is this to be achieved? Leaving the EU won’t do the job alone: net immigration from outside the bloc has consistently exceeded 100,000. So attention has turned to a policy that many people regard as obvious: keep low-skilled immigrants out, and prioritise the highly skilled. For example, a recent policy paper published by the lobby group “Leave Means Leave” calls for a “moratorium on unskilled visas”. The paper proposes that working visas should be issued only to those who meet certain requirements, including a job offer on a salary of at least £35,000.
But this is an interesting slippage in the use of the word “unskilled”. About three quarters of UK employees earn less than £35,000, and as Jonathan Portes of King’s College London points out, the majority of nurses, primary schoolteachers, technicians, paralegals and chemists earn less than this figure.
Proposing an end to “unskilled migration” sounds reasonable to many voters; they might find it less reasonable if they realised that some definitions of “unskilled” would exclude a teacher or an intensive care nurse.