This diary has a lot of details about Colbert-related traffic on my site yesterday and today, so beware.
I did a couple of posts on Colbert yesterday, one on the frabjous joy of the event and the other on the deafening silence from the institutional press.
On an average day, my site gets somewhere between 2,500 and 3,500 visits. Both of the Colbert posts percolated up to the Google News front page for a while, nested under the headlines on the event, so the traffic jumped substantially. Usually it just dries up when the links fall off the front page, but yesterday and today the barrage continued because so many, many people are doing searches for Colbert and the press dinner.
In consequence, the site got more than 8,000 visitors in the ten hours the first post was up yesterday, and as of 9:30 AM my time (I'm in Hawaii), the count for today stood at a bit more than 7,500. That
never happens unless I get a link from Atrios or the Kos front page or some other monster source, and not all that often even then.
Roughly 90% of the visits are coming from the Google News searches. I'm getting an unusual number of comments as well, and all but two or three out of 30 are extremely favorable toward Colbert.
Someone in another Kos diary noted that the most common complaint from the non-hysterical right wing is that Colbert was boring, or that he bombed. The latter is true, in the sense that the audience in the room was absolutely pole-axed, but obviously the only sense in which those people were his target audience is that they were his targets and they were an audience. The people he was playing to weren't in the room.
So that, the traffic, is one measure of the impact Colbert had: if my little site gets more than 20,000 visits from people looking for the videos and commentary, which looks likely at this point, imagine what the recommended Kos diaries, the Huffington Post commentary, Atrios and others are generating.
Add in all the other small and medium-sized sites, and the numbers have to be well into the millions. And that's with barely a whisper of coverage from the institutional press.
Again using my site as a reference: the outclicks are almost entirely directed at the videos and at the "Thank you, Stephen Colbert" site set up by Kos diarist grokgov, and the percentage of people clicking out to external links is much, much higher than usual, in the 30-40% range.
I'm not sure how many people have clicked out from me to grokgov's site, but it must be more than a thousand by now, and the last I checked his site had more than 10,000 responses. Anyone who blogs knows that getting people who aren't friends or communal participants to invest the time in writing a comment isn't easy, so my guess is that the 10,000 "thank-you" notes represent only a fraction of those who have visited his site, albeit probably a larger than usual fraction.
It's also worth noting, I think, that the number of overseas visitors to my site has tripled, jumping from the average of about 10% to about 30%, with most of them arriving through Google News Colbert searches. And they're coming from everywhere: the majority are in Canada (not overseas, I know, but slack is called for) and western Europe, but significant numbers are visiting from Australia/New Zealand, India, Russia, Japan, South Korea and even mainland China, with a smattering from Africa, South America and the Middle East (mostly Israel and Iran).
The point of all this is that Colbert's performance has become An Event, possibly a transformational one. It's osmosing into the national consciousness: the guy stood a few feet from the president and flayed him alive, and millions upon millions of people, here and abroad, are fascinated by it.
Most of those people are already unenamored of Bush and the press, but some of them will be among the shrinking group of people who are vaguely dissatisfied with the president but can't or don't articulate to themselves exactly why. Colbert has provided them a framework for articulation, a splendid illustration of the unclothed emperor. I think it'll have an impact.
A couple of comic notes: when I did a search on "Colbert" and "Bush" last night, the top result was Yahoo's pickup of Peter Daou's post on the institutional media's suppression of Colbert's performance; there were no major news outlets in the top 20 results. And somehow I wound up at Powerline, where one of the guys proclaimed Colbert an unknown bore, and linked out to what he described as real comedy: a Jack Benny clip.
Run away, run away!