On June 2nd, 2020, it was reported that former President Donald Trump would be shuttering his blog—only a month after it was reportedly started—primarily due to the fact that it was not doing well in its viewership numbers. And for the days that this story was a meaningful headline within mainstream news outlets, and pundits got in several solid news days of poking fun at him, I can’t help but feel as if this energy has been misplaced: almost as if those of us who do not like him have grown accustomed to talking shit about him, so when anything he does seems like a failure, we poke fun at it and we talk shit—the way people that hate Donald Trump usually do.
Before beginning, I’ll say that I really don’t care who you vote for, and that is your right as a citizen in the United States—which is why I didn’t vote for Donald Trump, nor did I think twice about it. And that is why what I am about to say next feels about as weird as a room of dogs playing poker and smoking cigars because traditionally, I don’t go out of my way to defend the man.
But the fact of the matter is that Donald Trump’s blog wasn’t a failure—not in the slightest, and if you think it is, then I am left to wonder if you think blogging is dead as a medium altogether.
“Spoiler Alert: It’s Not,” said the narrator.
Before we can continue, however, the question remains: what are we defining as failure, versus what are we defining as success? Rolling Stone and other news media outlets have reported that Trump’s blog attracted a whopping 212,000 total user engagements within a week of its launch, while at the same time going through all kinds of mental gymnastics trying to frame this as a failure because his blogging numbers “aren’t as big as his Twitter numbers.”
But there is a big problem with this kind of analysis: Blogging numbers should never be compared to Twitter numbers because they are not the same kind of media. That would be about as dumb on its fucking face as comparing Twitter numbers to YouTube numbers, which for successful creators would be more likely to skew higher—and all the same, be governed by a different set of metrics.
The reality is that Donald Trump’s numbers for his personal blog can really only be compared to the numbers of other personal blogs—and finding these numbers can be pretty hard because websites are not always easy to audit for traffic, and sometimes site owners do not want to be honest about their visitor figures. But I was able to find an interesting piece from someone who went through the rungs and worked themselves up to a $1,000,000 blog on personal finance, and his results might be considered eye-opening to some. The truth of the matter is that most personal bloggers aspire to attract within the range of 100,000-250,000 page views per month—motherfuck a week—and will spend years cultivating a following to get there to earn a healthy income somewhere between $8,000-$20,000 per month. This would put most people well into the 6-figure income range, which I am sure is way more than the average writer for any mainstream publication rakes in. But larger bloggers that attract near or above the million-viewer mark, can easily earn more than $80,000 per month in revenue.
Of course, there are a lot of extraneous factors that get writers to attract a million dollars per year from their blogs, but within the context of Donald J Trump, former president, and amateur blogger, 212,000 visitors in the first week are fucking gangbusters by any halfway-seasoned blogger’s standards.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t broadly in the public’s interest for his website to fail within the first month, but it is to say that it wasn’t actually a failure in the world of blogging. Instead, the former president was convinced that it was a failure, as being someone that is provably affected by what is said about him on TV. And while Donald Trump isn’t really a billionaire, I think most of us can admit that in the grand scheme of the amount of money he has made, $1 million per year from a personal blog would be a financial drop in the bucket, and probably wouldn’t have been enough for him to personally keep doing it.
What it would have been, however, is enough money to hire a small corps of batshit crazy writers, a couple of designers, and a videographer to propel his website into being something more than a blog: if Donald Trump was competent, and had even the slightest iota of patience, he could have turned his website into a media outlet that would have easily rivaled Fox News, Breitbart, and just about any other conservative media outlet in America. Furthermore, he could have taken his blog to attract conservative advertisers and create his own publication and corresponding media network to generate revenue from sites that weren’t explicitly his.
If we are being completely honest, that is what the mainstream media was afraid of—and naturally, that is why they had to do what was necessary to ensure Donald Trump’s blog died: promote the blog on major channels as a stillbirth failure out of the gate, bill it as culturally irrelevant while knowing that this is due to the president not being allowed on social media, and shop narratives that generally shit on blogging as a practice, even though many of these very same reporters regularly roll out projects in the form of books, blogs, and podcasts that few people read, and fewer give a fuck about.
And while Donald Trump’s blog may very well not have garnered the same numbers as his Twitter account (though I personally think he could have), what he would have done is attract a base of readers that were OK with consuming written content, and more ideologically invested in what he had to say as a MAGA movement “thought leader”—if you want to be so generous as to suggest that Donald Trump even has thoughts.
All of this is said to say that just because we wanted Donald Trump’s blog to be an objective failure, doesn’t necessarily mean that it was. It’s not that I care for Donald Trump, or wanted his blog to succeed—but rather, that if we are going to make assessments of the occurrences that happen within the media space, I think it would be beneficial for those assessments to be steeped in some semblance of objective reality. Good riddance, nonetheless.
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