The Scoop
Tim Miller doesn’t enjoy making the MrBeast face, the wide-eyed, open-mouthed smile of a million YouTube thumbnail images. But he acknowledges that the numbers don’t lie: It’s what his fans want.
“Why do people like to click on the crazy thumbnails? That’s a question for a psychologist,” he mused.
Miller, who came up as a Republican staffer — he worked on Jon Huntsman’s and Jeb Bush’s campaigns and co-founded the opposition research-focused super PAC America Rising before breaking with his party over Trump — is now the floppy-haired, open-collared face of Never Trump outlet The Bulwark, one of the breakout media successes of the 2024 election.
YouTube has been central to its surging popularity: The publication, which had 50,000 YouTube subscribers last September, had 631,000 as of Saturday afternoon and counting.
Much of that growth has happened in the last two months, and video is driving it: Since President Joe Biden dropped out from the race, the publication has netted 88 million views on YouTube (for scale, total views on all of The Bulwark’s YouTube videos from the prior five years were 64.2 million). The publication told Semafor it has been averaging 296,000 views per video since Biden’s withdrawal, making it one of the most-viewed-per-video producers in all of English-language news media.
Miller appears in 15 of The Bulwark’s top 20 most-viewed videos, many of them simple clips from one of The Bulwark’s podcasts, produced by video director Barry Rubin. A recurring segment, “Tim’s Takes,” features the former strategist giving solo monologues straight-to-camera with instant analysis of major topics; a nine-minute-long breakdown of Kamala Harris’ new television ad, titled “Kamala’s MOST POWERFUL AD So Far! Everyone Needs to See!” has gotten over 700,000 views since it was posted Thursday.
Miller, 42, who lives in New Orleans with his husband and daughter, had achieved ordinary political fame before his breakout year. He was a staple on cable news political panels, and co-hosted the final season of the canceled Showtime series The Circus in 2023. Now, he and his Bulwark colleagues are bona fide stars of political media.
During a lunch last week with this Semafor reporter in downtown D.C., a young woman stopped to ask for a selfie with Miller and Bulwark Publisher Sarah Longwell (“I can’t wait to send this to my mom,” she remarked). Backstage at the Atlantic Festival that day, staffers for Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) posed for pictures with The Bulwark duo before they took the stage to raucous applause. Panel moderator Evan Smith, the senior adviser to Atlantic owner Emerson Collective, pointed out that The Atlantic doesn’t often prefer to host other non-Atlantic media personalities at its events, but made an exception for The Bulwark crew, a sign of their influence and popularity.
It’s a remarkable success story for an outlet with around 20 full-time staffers that never had ambitions to reach a mass audience, much less one primarily interested in watching its journalists on-camera.
The publication launched in 2018 out of the ashes of the Weekly Standard, founding editor Bill Kristol’s conservative magazine, which found itself in an ideological no man’s land as one of the few right-leaning publications that failed to bow to Donald Trump. Originally, founders Kristol, Longwell, and Charlie Sykes conceived it as a conservative news aggregator, a place to share the views of Republicans in media and politics who had been alienated by Trump’s rise.
For Longwell, a former Republican staffer, The Bulwark began largely as a side project to her primary gig as a survey researcher and strategist. Early after The Bulwark’s launch she approached two of her political clients — Kathryn Murdoch, the wife of the Fox News owner’s son James, and liberal megadonor Reid Hoffman, who founded and sold LinkedIn. They were both readers and fans of the site, and she asked if they’d chip in to help cover the initial shortfalls of about $400,000 and keep the publication going.
The outlet’s subsequent growth happened almost by accident. After two years of running a WordPress news and opinion blog, the founders stumbled onto the business of selling newsletter subscriptions on Substack. Fans of the site had been trying to send The Bulwark money, and Longwell wanted to streamline the process and provide those fans with some extra content as a thank-you.
Four years on, The Bulwark is currently the fourth most popular news publication on Substack, behind Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, Heather Cox Richardson’s long running left-leaning history newsletter, and Nate Silver’s polling and media analysis project, the Silver Bulletin.
The surge has turned The Bulwark from an anti-Trump refuge into a promising media business. In an interview, Longwell told Semafor that subscriptions are on track to generate more than $5 million a year, which represents the main source of revenue for the publication. The publication added some original reporting, hiring seasoned journalists Marc Caputo and Sam Stein among others, which has helped drive subscriptions.
But YouTube has quickly become a large part of The Bulwark’s business, surpassing podcast advertising revenue and bringing in more than $300,000 earlier this year. Longwell said if The Bulwark continues at its current pace, it will likely break even this year.
Max’s view
The Bulwark is riding two converging trends in politics and media.
The publication has capitalized on the tectonic realignment that’s been happening in US politics, and serves as a kind of media escort from former Republicans on their way to support for Democratic candidates. (Weiss, in a neighboring ideological lane, offers a safe space for Democrats who can’t stomach Trump but feel their party and their flagship newspaper, The New York Times, have abandoned them, especially on campus-culture issues and Israel.)
This sometimes produces surreal scenes: Last week, a room full of 400 liberal and center-left Atlantic Festival guests erupted in applause for remarks by Kristol, once best known as the most committed media promoter of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
The Bulwark’s YouTube explosion also offers a glimpse into what a post-cable future might look like for political news. The Bulwark’s success has been driven in large part by Miller’s natural loose on-camera persona and the interest in some of its well-known hosts like George Conway. But its growth on YouTube mirrors that of conservatives like the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro or Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News personality, whose YouTube following rivals that of major broadcasters.
YouTube has become the largest service streamed on traditional TVs, making up 9.7% of all viewership on connected and traditional TVs in the U.S. in May. Users watch more than 1 billion hours of YouTube content on TV screens each day. And while most YouTube views are mobile, The Bulwark appears to be cutting into cable television’s audience: The Bulwark shared figures that showed over a quarter of the publication’s audience were watching YouTube videos and podcasts on their televisions.
(As on television, there are network effects on YouTube. Miller said he saw a spike once he started appearing across popular liberal YouTube news shows, like one hosted by Brian Tyler Cohen, a left-leaning YouTuber who has amassed 3 million subscribers and who also helped launch a political influencer firm.)
The lingering question that remains for The Bulwark: Is the ultimate aim political victory or business success?
Part of The Bulwark feels like a political project. Miller told Semafor that he and Longwell initially split time between The Bulwark and finding and running a Republican primary challenger to Trump in 2020.
That effort fizzled, but the primary focus of Longwell’s energies is still her survey and research business and political activities; while The Bulwark is separate from Longwell’s polling and consulting business, they share some staff and a small office in Washington.
Spending time with Miller and Longwell, I still got the sense that most of the work was fueled by the antipathy towards Trump and alienation from the current conservative movement. Part of The Bulwark’s appeal is rooted in the passion that drives the site and the sheer volume of work it produces. Staff like Longwell and Miller are pumping out videos every day and several podcasts a week, in addition to paid columns and weekly private podcasts.
But many publishers with much more commercial aims would kill to replicate some of The Bulwark’s success in subscriptions and on YouTube. Longwell said that while the outlet to this point hasn’t needed additional investment, she hasn’t ruled out finding investors to grow the publication, and if she was approached with a generous offer for an acquisition, she’d talk it over with the other key staff members.
I asked Longwell where she sees the publication in five years.
“Haven’t you heard? We have no idea. We keep stumbling into success after success without even trying,” Miller joked.
“Your question: How far does it go? As far as it goes,” Longwell said.
Her plans for one year out?
“We’re not pursuing big investment dollars to be like, hey, help us grow massively,” Longwell said. “I don’t think we have aspirations to challenge cable or whatever. But I do think we want to make change, we’re trying to persuade people. In part, it’s mission-driven. So we’re always going to be looking for how to reach more people, how to build the community. I think that the question of the business sort of sits adjacent to the political question.
“Because my bigger political ambition is: How do you build a new center in the country that sort of refuses to engage in extreme sides of politics? And so I want to build as big a community as possible.”