But that's if we believe this is a purely commercial venture. The Daily Mail is the most read newspaper in the UK and yet it's read by a vanishingly small proportion of the population. But what they manage to do is get their agenda into the public consciousness because the people who do read it will then go on to have discussions on websites like this. Journalists are obsessed with their own importance and desperate for content, so we end up with big shows with big viewerships like BBC Breakfast covering what's "in the news" as if it's an actual news story itself. Increasingly, we see them covering what people are saying on Twitter as if that's news too.
The right wingers at the moment seem to have this obsession with "winning the culture war" and it wouldn't surprise me if this news channel is another example of that where the actual profitability isn't too much of a concern. And to do that, it doesn't need to be a big news channel, it just needs to create enough clips to go viral and get people discussing the issues it wants people to discuss in terms it wants them to discuss them. Kinda like LBC. Although like LBC they might have just realised that in the current climate, the most profitable thing to do is to create these viral moments, which means having people saying ridiculous or outrageous things. It's also the reason that chat shows are increasingly asking their guests to play stupid games, because "Scarlett Johansson tries to guess the world capitals" is more clickable than "an interesting conversation with Scarlett Johansson."
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