Breitbart News pushes deeper into Europe

A NOTABLE American commentator, Charles Krauthammer, once explained Rupert Murdoch’s success in founding Fox News, a cable channel, by pointing out that he had found a niche market—half the country. The same may be true of Breitbart News, a conservative website whose fortunes have risen with those of Donald Trump, and whose chairman, Stephen Bannon (pictured), is Mr Trump’s chief strategist.

Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor at Breitbart, explained after Mr Trump’s victory that half of voters are “repulsed by the Lena Dunham, Black Lives Matter, third-wave feminist, communist, ‘kill-all-white-men’ politics of the progressive left.” Breitbart saw it coming a while ago, he added. The company’s expansion plans suggest it sees something coming in Europe, too. It already has a website in Britain and in January it will launch French and German sites.

Founded by Andrew Breitbart, a conservative journalist who died in 2012, the site is just nine years old. Its formula—outraging and fascinating readers with “click bait”, occasional fake news, polemics and attacks on mainstream media—has taken off. Ten days after the election it said it had received 45m unique visitors in 31 days—modest compared with mainstream outlets. But its profile is rising rapidly. In some time periods—for example, between May 13th and June 13th this year—it has boasted the highest number of social-media interactions for political content in English, beating outlets like CNN, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal. During that time its closest rival, the liberal Huffington Post, lagged by nearly 2m clicks and shares.

So far the company’s political achievements have been more transparent than its commercial ones. Breitbart refuses to release revenue figures, although pundits suspect that its advertising streams are not big enough to sustain its current operations in America and Britain. It is financed by private backers, notably Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund billionaire and a big donor to Mr Trump’s campaign, who reportedly invested $10m in the site a few years ago. Yet compared with traditional media, its overheads are small: a few opinionated journalists, some interns and readers who fill up the comments page at no extra cost.

Breitbart’s ad revenues, such as they are, could prove volatile. Its content is frequently toxic: its comment section is a platform for members of far-right hate groups to rail against immigration and Jews. On November 29th Kellogg’s, an American maker of breakfast cereal, announced it was pulling its ads from the site. Kellogg’s is not alone. Allstate, an insurer, Warby Parker, which sells spectacles, EarthLink, an internet provider, and SoFi, a fintech firm, have blacklisted Breitbart. This week, some German companies, including BMW, a carmaker, joined the boycott.

As Breitbart’s reach climbs, however, many firms will feel torn. The site has said that the departure of Kellogg’s will not harm it financially. (Indeed, the cereal maker’s share price has fallen since the site began urging consumers to “#DumpKelloggs”.) Many advertisers, such as Nissan, a Japanese carmaker, have opted to stay.

The push deeper into Europe may seem an oddly international approach for a brand that scorns the ideals of a global order. Yet Breitbart has a clear operational model: moving into markets where it can win an audience by appealing to anti-globalisation and anti-immigrant sentiment and by aligning itself with an existing opposition party. A connection to a political entity lends it credibility and also allows Breitbart to draw fragmented online communities together into an organised platform, says Angelo Carusone of Media Matters for America, which monitors conservative media in Washington, DC.

In Britain, where it launched in 2014, Breitbart loudly promoted the campaign of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) to leave the European Union. The Leave team used its content, and UKIP’s Nigel Farage became a columnist. Raheem Kassam, an editor on the site, went to work as Mr Farage’s aide. He has since returned and is leading Breitbart’s push to expand further.

Conditions are similarly ripe in France and Germany, media observers say. Elections are due in both countries next year and far-right candidates—Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France and Frauke Petry of Alternative for Germany—hope to do well. Breitbart will cheer on their respective parties.

Incumbents do exist. In France, for example, conservative publications such as Valeurs actuelles have been flourishing as Ms Le Pen’s popularity has surged, notes Paul Ackermann, editor-in-chief of Huffington Post France. But they have no professional internet presence. Supporters of the National Front, many of whom are young, do not have a media outlet where they can meet and exchange ideas. “The door is wide open” for a site like Breitbart, Mr Ackermann says. François Godard, a media analyst, sees a gap between the country’s mainstream media and an increasingly populist readership. The online comments on the websites of Le Monde or Le Figaro are often more attuned to the Breitbart point of view than to the papers’ own content, he says.

“America first”—European edition

In Germany, where most outlets lean left, the right-wing media scene is particularly underdeveloped—a cultural aversion born of the country’s fascist past. Breitbart will have to contend with strict laws governing hate speech and anti-Semitism. Junge Freiheit is one of a tiny number of conservative papers. It has had a surge in readers since Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, opened the country’s borders to migrants in 2015. But its circulation is still less than 30,000, perhaps due to a weak online presence. Breitbart could address that by bringing right-wing media consumers together on a single platform.

If Breitbart recruits well-known figures in local markets, as the Huffington Post has done, its path may be smoother. In Britain, alongside Mr Kassam, it appointed James Delingpole, a conservative journalist who writes in the Spectator, a 180-year-old right-of-centre magazine. Things are going well: the site’s audience has grown by 135% year on year, to 15m monthly page views in July, meaning it has a bigger reach than the Spectator’s own site. Not bad for a firm recently called a “bunch of nuts” by a spokesman for Mitt Romney, a former presidential candidate. The business of outrage, led in the early days by Rush Limbaugh, a right-wing talk-show host, and then perfected by Fox News, may well become another ubiquitous American export.