Alex Jones Said Bans Would Strengthen Him. He Was Wrong.

For a brief period after the bans, Mr. Jones enjoyed a bump in publicity. Traffic to Infowars.com soared 67 percent to about 777,000 visits a day in the two weeks after the ban, compared with the previous two weeks, SimilarWeb said. Downloads of the Infowars app surged sixfold to 25,500 downloads a day over the same period, according to Apptopia, which tracks app data.

But both figures have since fallen to nearly pre-ban levels. And the spike could not replace the lost traffic from the top three Facebook and YouTube channels for Infowars, which together averaged roughly 900,000 video views a day in the three weeks before the ban, according to Tubular Labs.

Other outlets have not helped much. Even as Mr. Jones’s account has remained on Twitter, his videos there attract 21,000 views on average, compared with 44,500 views per YouTube video, according to NeoReach, which helps brands market on social media. The Infowars accounts on other sites, such as Dailymotion, Amazon’s Twitch and BitChute, a video site mostly for people barred from YouTube, garner views in the hundreds for videos — and often fewer.

NeoReach said an analysis of Mr. Jones’s followers on social media showed that most were white married men, with an average age of 28 and average annual income of $46,500. NeoReach said his Twitter account “has a notable audience concentration in New York.”

Despite Mr. Jones’s early pronouncements that the bans would make his Infowars operation stronger, there are signs he is concerned.

On one recent show, he ranted without evidence that Silicon Valley companies gave liberals like the billionaire George Soros access to their users’ personal data, including “your film roll, what you did with your wife, your kids, you know, in the bathtub, Grandma.”

“It’s all theirs,” he shouted. “And everybody’s lining up to kiss these monsters’ disgusting satanic souls.”

Seconds later, the show went to a break, cutting to a recorded promotion in which Mr. Jones urged his followers to share Infowars’ videos on social media and to sign up for its newsletter “so there’s no way the censors can get between us.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/technology/alex-jones-infowars-bans-traffic.html?partner=rss&emc=rss