There was a time, not very long ago, when Ben Shapiro could reasonably call himself the king of all conservative media.

His company, the Daily Wire, dominated social-media feeds and podcast apps; in the run-up to the 2020 election, it was ranked as Facebook’s top English-language publisher for three straight months. Virality seemed to be the Daily Wire’s birthright: Scathing news items on Nancy Pelosi’s salon visits during the pandemic racked up millions more views than the websites of Fox News, CNN, and the New York Times. Shapiro himself was ubiquitous, a right-wing star who had risen to fame before Donald Trump and seamlessly adapted to the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. He was a digital battering ram against the Democrats and the progressive left. He seemed guaranteed, like Fox itself, for an indefinite run at the top of the media heap.

That’s all over now. The Daily Wire is instituting significant layoffs. Its YouTube channel’s subscriber base is starting to shrink, and its website has emerged as one of the great traffic losers in conservative media. There are Daily Wire YouTube videos that now, after a few days online, have less than 10,000 views, a catastrophically small number for a channel with more than 3 million subscribers. The top comments all mock the low view counts.

If a variety of poor business decisions can be blamed, in part, for the Daily Wire’s fall from grace — ill-fated investments in feature films, an epic fantasy series, and peculiar merchandise — the greater story is the collapse of Shapiro’s constituency, especially among the young media........

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