Whether you agree with the premise one way or the other, it seems like the data does not say what they think it says with as much certainty as they think. (I also think that solely blaming the media is problematic.)
Pageviews per article is not without flaws: if the media is writing more articles on Trump, then it will decrease. If a site has 10 articles on Trump, and 1 or 2 on the other candidates each day, and Trump's average view per article is similar then it's hard to conclude that there is a lack of interest.
Their graph shows Trump's average on par with the others, but he occupies 50% of the pie. That's huge. How is that categorized as "not driving traffic"?
It seems one assumption is sites could just write more articles about other candidates with the same engagement. If Hillary Clinton gets 6% more average clicks per article, it's hard to just pump out another article on Hillary if nothing new or novel has been said or done by her. Trump creates headlines and drums up controversy whenever he can in a way that most other candidates can't, because he's good at that. It's almost a symbiotic relationship with Trump and coverage of him.
Their idea of the definition of "driving revenue" is defined by the average clicks to read a Trump article. If your competitor has articles about Trump, and you don't, could you get away with that? Clearly people are reading articles about Trump here, so those views could disappear to other sites. (There is also the assumption that it's important that people click into the article, but many people will skim the headlines of a website.)
It also just compares coverage to other candidates, but the content driven revenue of a site is not just a basket of political candidates. It is relative to all other content as well. How much interest does Trump attract across the site?
Their chosen time period is November 2015 to May 2016. This ignores any jump start Trump might have received while his campaign was still nascent, relative to the many other contenders. The media coverage started way before November. You might say by November that Trump already was polling high enough that it was hard to ignore him. He announced his presidency in June 2015, and Trump has been consistently and heavily covered since. And Trump was already a celebrity and had been for years.
And this is why I was motivated to respond: "Many of the media companies we work with at Parse.ly encourage a data-driven culture that makes it easy for their employees to make informed content decisions. For example, anyone using Parse.ly can perform an analysis similar to the one we shared above."
I'm hoping "data-driven culture" in business doesn't become a synonymous with arbitrarily using data to make a point or disingenously undermine an argument. If there isn't discipline in application, then "data-driven" approaches will eventually gain a reputation as useless.
Not to be too cute, but I wonder how much traffic this post about Trump will drive to parsely.com relative to other blog posts.