The conservative media company Daily Wire was once a star of the MAGA digital universe, dominating social media feeds and podcast apps with a blend of “anti-woke” commentary, viral Facebook posts and culture-war stunts.
In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the company co-founded by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro ranked as Facebook’s top English-language publisher for three straight months. Its sarcastic news items on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s salon visits gained millions more views than the websites of Fox News, CNN and the New York Times.
But the company now faces sweeping layoffs and heavy skepticism over its online future, with some critics — including former employees, such as Candace Owens — arguing its relevance to the right has irrevocably collapsed.
Its YouTube channel’s subscriber base has plateaued or shrunk in 15 of the 16 months since the start of 2025, according to data from the analytics firm Social Blade. And in an analysis of 20 conservative news sites, the Daily Wire has consistently ranked among the biggest year-over-year traffic losers since last summer, according to estimates from the market intelligence firm Similarweb that were compiled by the media newsletter TheRighting. In March, the website’s traffic was half of what it was the year before.
The Daily Wire’s fall from grace reflects the fragmentation of partisan media online, as centralized institutions such as Breitbart and Fox lose attention to a scattered network of podcasters, streamers and provocateurs.
Though it advertises itself as “America’s leading voice of the counter-culture movement,” the Daily Wire now draws criticism that it mirrors the mainstream media giants it once pledged to unravel.
Stretched thin by corporate expansion and overly reliant on an outdated business model, the company’s biggest vulnerability may nevertheless be the “populist cannibalism” consuming Republican politics, said Nicole Hemmer, a conservative-media historian at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Messengers of the Right.”
The company’s brand of traditional conservatism, exemplified by Shapiro’s intense support of Israel, has clashed with right-wing creators promising a more radical brand of anti-incumbent, antiestablishment rage, she said.
“Ben Shapiro has become the avatar of a strand of conservatism that has been taking it on the chin for years,” Hemmer said. “And they are now losing favor within the conservative movement, which is as much a problem for [President Donald] Trump as it is for Ben Shapiro.”
Brad Bishop, a Daily Wire spokesman, said the company had cut 13 percent of its staff since the beginning of this year and currently has more than 200 employees. Most of the job cuts are centered at the Daily Wire’s headquarters in Nashville, but the company retains staff in D.C., Florida and the Northeast, and will continue to invest in “an ambitious slate of new entertainment projects set to release this year,” a company statement said.
“The internet says we are going ‘bankrupt’ or ‘dying’ every year,” Bishop said.
In a statement, Shapiro said the company’s revenue had fallen compared with 2024 and that some moves, including Owens’s firing, affected its financial base, but that the company was “not going anywhere” and still had cash-flow numbers that “dwarf those of our critics.” He also sought to put distance between his company’s politics and the changing views of critics on the right.
“While much of the rest of the ‘conservative movement’ decided it was a good idea to clickwhore by embracing radical Islam, theorizing about the evils of Winston Churchill, extolling the wonders of Russian supermarkets, and mocking the widow of Charlie Kirk … we decided not to do those things,” Shapiro said, referring to critics such as Owens and the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. “If that’s a strategic business failure, then I guess we can live with that.”
Founded in 2015, the Daily Wire quickly made a name for itself with biting blog items and headlines like “Hillary Cackles When Asked If She Was Alone Night of Benghazi.” It leaped past traditional conservative journals by building attention through Shapiro’s hit podcast and its relentless posting onto Facebook, where its ad-supported business made the bulk of its income. In early 2022, co-founder and chief executive Jeremy Boreing said the company had grown to 150 employees and $100 million in yearly revenue.
The company expanded into projects far beyond the conventional work of a right-wing blog. It invested in feature films, including a Western (“Terror on the Prairie”) and a school-shooting thriller (“Run Hide Fight”). It launched a publishing division, printing a book by one of the Louisville police officers who fatally shot Breonna Taylor inside her home.
In 2022, the company launched a video-streaming service, DailyWire+, which Boreing said marked “the beginning of an aggressive technological and content expansion.” Then, a year later, Boreing announced that the company would invest $100 million into a second network, Bentkey, focused on children’s shows. The programming, he said, would compete with Disney, which he accused of working to “indoctrinate kids into the LGBTQIA cult.”
The company took swings at Hollywood with movies like “Lady Ballers,” a comedy directed by and starring Boreing about a group of men who play women’s sports. Some of them paid off, including the 2024 satirical documentary “Am I Racist?” that grossed more than $12 million on a $3 million budget, box-office figures show.
But the cost and scale of those wild projects raised some eyebrows, even among some of the Daily Wire’s biggest fans, said Howard Polskin, a media analyst who runs TheRighting. “It all seemed like a huge overreach,” Polskin said. “Their ambitions were so huge, and the stuff seemed like a quick way to go broke.”
Some of the Daily Wire’s biggest names exuded confidence with the business, including Boreing, who told Puck in late 2024 that the company would be a $10 billion business and had played a role in Trump’s victory. Shortly before, Matt Walsh, the podcaster and star of “Am I Racist?,” had posted a video to X showing an MSNBC commercial for the movie and saying he was giddy about the cost.
“The Daily Wire is losing thousands of dollars running these ads to an audience that will not subscribe or watch the film,” he said. “I will waste as much of the Daily Wire’s money as it takes just to make sure that every MSNBC viewer has been sufficiently traumatized.”
In recent years, however, the company’s Facebook dominance has been supplanted by intensified competition from right-wing creators on fast-growing platforms. Some former personalities, including Brett Cooper, left the network to create independent podcasts that now rival the audience they had while on the company’s payroll.
The Daily Wire has sought to expand its income streams through branded merchandise, promoting a line of cigars endorsed by commentator Michael Knowles and a Shapiro collection of scented candles. In 2022, the Daily Wire had released a commercial starring the self-described “CEO and god king” Boreing, wearing a Gucci jacket and driving a McLaren supercar, to advertise the “woke-free” shaving brand Jeremy’s Razors.
But the company also continued its spending spree, most notably on an epic fantasy series, “The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin,” that was filmed in Hungary and Italy and required thousands of special-effects shots, according to production videos posted online. A YouTube channel for the seven-episode show, which Page Six reported cost $3 million per episode, has fewer than 1,000 subscribers.
In November, about six months before the latest round of layoffs, electronic billboards began beaming Shapiro’s smile above New York’s Times Square as part of a Daily Wire campaign promoting his show for the Golden Globes’ new Best Podcast award. He was not nominated.
Mitchell Jackson, a publicist who represents Owens, Cooper and other new-media creators, said the spending epitomized the company’s pursuit of conventional celebrity.
“They identify as alternative media, but they want to be old media so bad,” he said. “They don’t hate Hollywood. They’re mad Hollywood hates them.”
News of the layoffs this week sparked debates over the Daily Wire’s future, though Boreing, who did not respond to requests for comment, said on his YouTube show this week that the cuts were “not of great consequence as a news story,” given the company was still “making movies … and breaking stories.”
The layoffs come just one year after the last job cuts, in March 2025, and after Boreing stepped down as chief executive. A Daily Wire spokesman said previously that those cuts had been “based on business needs and operational efficiencies” and that the company remained focused on ensuring its “long-term success.”
Owens, who left in 2024 following tensions with the company over claims of antisemitism and extreme rhetoric, said in an interview that the company made disastrous financial choices in its pursuit of mainstream fame and legitimacy. But its most severe error, she argued, was that the company became more intolerant about the ideas it would promote, leading to ideological clashes over Israel and other matters.
They promised a freethinking alternative to the legacy media’s perceived liberal bent but then “became what they claimed they were getting into the business to fight,” Owens said. Their message became “lecture, lecture, lecture, lecture, everyone’s terrible but me,” she added, “and people just don’t want to see it. That’s not interesting. I don’t want to be lectured every day.”
Shapiro, who is Jewish, is an outspoken defender of Israel and its close U.S. ties, putting him at odds with a conservative faction who argue the issue conflicts with “America First” ideals. Shapiro has dismissed some criticisms of Israel as rooted in antisemitic conspiracy theories, including from Owens, calling her views “absolutely disgraceful.”
The Daily Wire contends that it is still on a growth path, pointing to a new permanent seat in the White House briefing room. And the Daily Wire’s podcast network still got millions of listens in the United States last month, ranking in popularity above the networks of Paramount and Barstool Sports, according to data from the industry analytics firm Podtrac.
But shows by right-wing firebrands such as Megyn Kelly and Carlson are growing fast, offering commentary more critical of the Republican establishment than the Daily Wire’s standard fare and outpacing content from Shapiro, the company’s most famous face.
Shapiro’s podcast ranks 43rd on the Spotify charts, at least 30 places behind shows by Owens and Carlson, and his YouTube views have plunged nearly 70 percent since December 2024, according to the video-tracking site VidIQ. Though his YouTube videos once consistently received millions of views, recent clips, like “THIS Democrat Claimed God Was Non-Binary,” have netted about 20,000 views in a span of two weeks.
In a podcast interview this week, Kelly said Carlson was seeing a shift in audience over his views on Israel, whose relationship with the U.S. he has described as “deeply destructive and humiliating.” Despite losing a share of “the Fox News audience that’s very, very pro-Israel and pro-Trump,” she said, Carlson was gaining newer viewers who wanted to “hear these traditional lines challenged.”
After Shapiro shared the clip, saying, “Go get them clicks,” Kelly offered her own reply: “Don’t you have a company to save?”
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