Donald Trump Jr and a number of former Trump staffers have launched a news aggregator app, MxM News, to challenge Apple News and Google News, and attempt to fill in the gap left by the Drudge Report’s fall from dominance.
MxM (short for Minute by Minute) News will be a mobile app, that features curated stories from “a variety of publishers from across the ideological spectrum,” a spokesman for the company told Axios on Tuesday. A small team of 8 staffers will be responsible for the curation of news, with artificial intelligence being potentially used in the future to personalise a news feed.
The company has been put together by Trump Jr and former spokesman for President Trump Taylor Budowich, and was designed by Telegraph Creative, whose CEO is Cliff Sims, the former Trump White House aide and Deputy Director of National Intelligence.
“We created the MxM News app to help people cut through that clutter and get trustworthy news and information about topics that matter and impact their lives,” Trump Jr. said in a statement to Axios.
“We view it as an important public service and also believe it will be a great business.”
At press time, MxM News had already reached the number 6 position in the Magazines & Newspapers category of the Apple App Store.
The aim of MxM News is to tackle what they perceive as a leftist bias in the news aggregation space, which is currently dominated on mobile by Apple and Google News.
“As I travel around the country, the complaint I hear more than almost anything else is that people don’t know what media outlets, journalists, or stories they can actually trust,” Trump Jr said.
A spokesman said that they planned to disrupt the news aggregator space the same way Drudge Report did in the 1990s. With Drudge page views falling by 57% in the last few years, MxM plans to take over the space left by them.
Their closest competitors on the right are likely to be Gab Trends, Revolver News, and Liberty Daily. There are some key differences between MxM News and the existing sites, however.
The current conservative alternatives to Drudge and the existing news aggregate sites are primarily web-based, while MxM is likely to remain an app.
There are also no plans at present for MxM News to hire journalists or write original content, which Revolver and Liberty Daily both produce.
It remains to be seen if MxM news will face censorship issues from Apple or Google Play, as happened with Parler and Gab. Instead of attempting to regain access to the app stores, Gab built web-based alternatives.
Parler modified the rules it holds its users to, and was eventually returned to the Apple App Store.
Most importantly, with the app’s slogan of “mainstream news without the mainstream bias,” and their explicit desire to “position the app as having broad appeal,” it is unclear whether the app will dare to pick up any news sources from content creators to the right of Conservative Inc.
The launch of MxM News follows the launch of Truth Social from President Trump himself, which currently receives around 550,000 hits per day. The app is currently not allowing new users, and there are up to 1 million people reportedly waiting to use the site.
MxM is available on the Apple App Store and on Google Play.
