Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire Face Decline as Podcast Audiences Shift Toward Independent Media

I saw this story this morning, and it was fascinating to me, because it is talking about the changing way in which you consume media. And it was a very interesting read for me because I think it’s not talking about directly, but it goes to the heart of why our show is doing so well. Look, I don’t know how much you guys know about podcasts, but the idea that you could set up a podcast unless it’s, you know, some known superstar that is a local based podcast, that’s what we do. That’s our niche, a local based podcast that is doing well over 3000 people a day across the platforms. And they’re on average listening or viewing for 60 minutes. It’s amazing to a lot of people.

The Daily Wire Decline Reflects Major Changes in Conservative Media Consumption

It isn’t to me because people are craving different, especially the talk radio world. Look, talk radio, whether it is terrestrial radio or the podcasting world, is failing miserably to offer people something different. People crave authenticity. They crave different. They crave things they can’t get anywhere else. And I knew when we started this Indiana based podcast that it would be successful in terms of the realistic opportunities that were available to us. And this article is about Ben Shapiro and the fall of The Daily Wire. Now, many of you guys know The Daily Wire has been this wildly successful podcasting platform. They have many, many hosts on the Daily Wire. There’s a video aspect to it, audio aspect to it. And for years in the late 20 teens, you know, through the first part of the 2020s, Daily Wire, along with Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, was this media juggernaut. And it was run by a guy by the name of Ben Shapiro. And it was sort of like Lennon and McCartney, right? Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, one A and one B. And New York Magazine has a detailed article about the fall, the decline of The Daily Wire. And The Daily Wire, according to New York Magazine, is instituting significant layoffs. Its YouTube subscriber base is starting to shrink. The website, the traffic that it generates is losing steam. And one of the things that’s interesting is, and I’ll just read you this from the New York Magazine article, there are Daily Wire YouTube videos now that 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. Now look, you’re saying, well, you’re a guy who just talked about 3000 plus viewers or subscribers, and you’re criticizing a company with 10,000 views. Well, it’s all relevant, right? We’ve been at this 11 weeks. They’ve been at this for a decade or more. Also, when we started this, we were cognizant there were a whole bunch of people, as in the entire country out of the state of Indiana, or people without a connection to the state of Indiana. We weren’t going to get any of those people. It’s what you do when you go, we’re going to be a local based podcast. Our goal when we started this show is that years from now, we’re going to change the landscape of Indiana politics and government the way we did on our radio show. Our radio show was number one for years for two reasons. One, we were almost, well, I tried to be. I tried. Some people couldn’t keep up, but I tried to be all local. You guys knew when you tuned into that radio show, you were, as much as humanly possible, going to get me talking about local content, local stuff, local stories you couldn’t get anywhere else like the Mid-States Corridor, like Kleinhelter, like property taxes, all of these things.

Independent Local Podcasts Continue Growing as National Talk Media Becomes More Repetitive

Look, our radio show was so good at that. We literally drove an entire year of policy discussion about property taxes, didn’t get what we wanted in the end, but the whole conversation in the General Assembly for an entire year was driven because of our desire to do great local content. And Braun essentially admitted that. But the point is, I know there’s a cap on what we can do in terms of doing an Indiana based program, Indiana based content. I told you guys I had a meeting when I was thinking about what we were going to do. Somebody who’s a huge fan of our program connected me with a fairly prominent agent in Hollywood. Now this guy’s not out representing The Rock or Taylor Swift, but this person represents many known actors, actresses, singers, musicians, whatever, and people, if I gave you their names, you would know who they are. And this guy said, I’m very interested in what you’re doing. My friend who connected us told me a lot about you. I started looking into you. He said, you’re going to start this podcast, I want to know more about it because I might be interested in representing you. And I told him what I wanted to do. And you guys know, I love reading body language of people, and I can see this guy’s body language. He’s like disappointed in what I’m telling him. And, you know, I get done with telling him what we’re going to do. And I said, this is my standard for success. This is what I want to do, what I want to accomplish. And he goes, well, you know, from my perspective as a rep, that’s really going to limit what I can sell for you. Like if you’re not going to go national, it really limits who I can go to and the amount of money I’d be able to make for you on this product. And I looked at him and said, well, like, what if I don’t care about the money? And he was like, what? I was like, well, don’t get me wrong. Like, I care about money. Like I have a mortgage to pay. I have bills to pay. I have a kid. But like, what if money isn’t my primary driver? And we talked about what my primary driver was and I said, my primary driver, just like it was on the radio show for years, it’s not about money. It’s never been about money for me. That’s why the politicians hate me. That’s why I’m a danger to them. There is no leverage. We’re in a 300 square foot room right now, and it isn’t even 300ft². 240. I just pay the bills, I pay, I pay, I don’t know what’s going on here, but we’re in a little room. It’s two guys and look at what we’ve created. Because money is not our driver. We make enough thanks to you guys, thanks to our sponsors, that we’ll be able to keep this going for the very foreseeable future. But our primary goal, our success, is to change the conversation in Indiana politics and government and build this thing over time, thanks to you guys, with quality content that we believe people will consume, that we are going to be a difference maker, not just on the level, but a bigger level than we were before. And look, it’s going to take time. You can’t just turn the radio on and hear us anymore. That’s the great thing about what we’re doing now. Every person who consumes us, there is no accidental consumption. There is no scanning the dial. There is no, well, I just left it on. Every person who tunes into this program, the thousands of people already every day who stay on average for 60 minutes, they have to find us and deliberately consume us. And that was the goal. And the guy basically said, he goes, well, you’re going to cost yourself a lot of money. I said, that’s okay. I don’t care. This has never been about the money. Because when things start becoming about the money, then people can leverage things over you. And so my point is we are growing within the realistic scale we’ve set for ourselves based on what we’re doing, because we have vowed to be different every day. We’ve vowed to be independent. No one controls us. No one owns us. No one owns us. We are beholden only to you. You, the audience, made us. You, the audience, can break us. And you are here because you’re getting something you can’t get anywhere else.

Critics Say Conservative Media Lost Its Edge by Becoming Too Politically Aligned

And one of the major mistakes made in the landscape of talk radio, the talk industry, conservative talk industry is everybody fits in a box now. Like you listen to the majority of certainly the national content, nobody stands out. And a lot of the reason nobody stands out is people are petrified to take a gamble on independence. Look, in the beginning the Daily Wire was different. Turning Point was different. That’s why people went to them. Those entities now, because everyone is scared to death to get on the wrong side of Trump, everyone’s scared to death to say anything that gets on the wrong side of Trump, they’re now becoming boring because they’re seen as cheerleaders. And yes, they have a huge base of people to start from. So that burn, as is laid out in the Daily Wire article, is happening over time. You think about the history of this business and my business. I’m talking about talk radio. You look at the people that have taken off. Now it’s talk podcasting. You know, I morph them into one when I’m talking about this here. You think about the people who took off. Why did Rush? I mean, Rush was great, but he was also first. He was sort of the first guy to do when he was out in Sacramento doing what he did. People were like, this is different. Nobody’s done this before. It just so happened nobody did it as well as him before or after, and nobody ever will. He’s the Babe Ruth. Babe Ruth just happened to be first in the case of Rush. Now there were other people, smaller talk, etc., but not the way Rush did it, not in the manner. Same thing with Stern. Stern wasn’t a great broadcaster. He was first. He was different. He took a gamble. People were like, this is different. This guy’s going to say something every day that I can’t get anywhere else. And people tune in, and it plays out in the movie. People who hated him listened to him as much or longer as people who liked him. And talk radio now for a while was cutting edge talk. Podcasting was cutting edge. People were tuning in because they were getting thought, they were getting ideas. They were getting consumption of content that the mainstream media wasn’t willing to give them. And in the case of Daily Wire, they were sort of on the forefront of that. On the podcasting side, as talk radio got traditional and got boring. I mean, I’m sorry, guys. The national guys and the people who want to be national guys, they’re boring. They are. They’re all the same. Any of these people, for the most part, who desire, who fancy themselves national talk show hosts or the people who have achieved it, there’s very little that you get that you go, oh my God, that’s so different. That’s so interesting. That used to happen all the time in our business. It doesn’t happen anymore. Why? Because there’s a formula to get syndicated. You got to appeal into these national corporations, these national political figures, these national entities, and they have the way they want it done. And by the way, syndication, and Jason will back me up on this, syndication is over. That game is over. There’s fewer and fewer syndicators. There’s fewer and fewer people doing national products anymore. It just doesn’t work. The economy of scale doesn’t work the way it used to. When Rush died, that industry took a huge hit, a huge hit. I’m not saying there aren’t national shows. Clearly there are. And clearly there are people that are at the top of that pecking order that are still doing it and making money. I’m saying there was a time where you could be local a la a Bob and Tom, and then you could make it national. You could take great local content. That doesn’t happen anymore. It doesn’t happen anymore. And so the Daily Wire goes to great heights because it was different. It was the outsider in an inside world. And people were like, we like this. It’s younger people. It’s a younger viewpoint, a different view, same sort of ideas for the most part in many cases, but also not afraid to be edgy and poke a finger at talk radio and the political system and the Republican Party and say, you guys are letting everyone down. Now, as this New York article, New York Magazine goes on to talk about, they became mainstream. And when you become mainstream, and they made many poor business decisions. Ben Shapiro has made a lot of poor business decisions, it appears. And again, you can read the New York Magazine article. It goes into detail on this. They did things like the movies that they did. They did those feature films that are just people look at this and go, I don’t want movies. I want some guy bringing smoke every day. I want some guy that’s gonna look in a camera and talk to me, or go into a microphone and talk to me about things that I care about, you know, the merch, all of this stuff. It became more about money, it seemed like, than the content and the relationship and the connection with the audience.

Younger Audiences Increasingly Reject Political Cheerleading and Establishment Messaging

And one of the things that New York Magazine goes into detail on is how younger people are leaving in droves, which was the core of the audience, because of Shapiro’s unwavering commitment on this Iran stuff, where supporting Trump was supposed to be about a core set of ideals that were different. And one of the core tenets of Trump that appealed to a lot of young people was no more wars. We’re not doing this. No more military industrial complex. No more people of our generation fighting and dying and racking up all this debt over the messes in the Middle East. Young men voted for Trump in droves in 24, and I think that was a big part of it. And Shapiro has become all in because he’s so pro-Israel. And look, you can be pro-Israel and not say, we do whatever Israel wants. It doesn’t make you anti-Semitic. It doesn’t make you a bad guy. It doesn’t make you an ist. It doesn’t make you a phobe to go, no, enough. We’ve given you enough. This is your problem. We do enough for you. We’re backing off. No more money, no more military industrial complex. No more debt, no more nothing. We’ve done enough. And there are some people, including in this city, who will lose their mind if you look at them and say that because with so many quote unquote conservatives, they’re conservative until it comes to their thing. They’re principled until it comes to their thing. And when it’s their thing, then all the rules go out the window. That’s the thing you guys have noticed over the years about this show. There is no my thing. We are consistent on everything about how we apply things across the board, and Shapiro has become more and more establishment Republican. The talking points, the people he seems to be in bed with, in relationships with. And people just say, we’re done with this. You were different. You were unique. You were special. And now you’re just another guy. And look, I’m not saying the Daily Wire is going away tomorrow. I’m not saying they’re done. I’m not saying that’s it. But I am saying they’ve taken a huge hit. They are very leveraged and they appear to be in some trouble. People in our business need to stop cheerleading for politicians. They need to stop cheerleading for special interest. They need to bring to you, the audience, the desire, the commitment to hold everyone accountable, whether it’s a local show or a national show. That’s what you crave. That’s what you’re about. That’s why talk radio elevated to begin with. People were saying things that were different. They were giving the public content they couldn’t get anywhere else. And we’ve long since moved past that. Talk radio, talk podcasting, more and more becomes a team sport. I’m in this camp. I’m on this team. When it should be about authenticity of thought, difference of thought, difference of opinion, independent thinking. Look, there are people who are just all Trump all the time, and if you say anything bad, they’re not going to be for you. And that’s okay. You’re not going to get those people. That’s all right.