Dkos Traffic Trending Down - Thoughts?
Fri Dec 28, 2007 at 06:57:43 AM PDT
I was talking with someone about the rise of DailyKos the other night. The idea of how big Dkos could get came up and we discussed the idea that it probably has already reached critical mass and that it was likely to trend down in the future, especially if Hillary is the nominee (as I'm sure you know she isn't very popular around these parts). This morning I checked the site traffic for Dkos, something I've only done once before. I have to say I was surprised by the trend.
Traffic peaked in August of this year at 16.8 million visits (not to be confused with visitors) and has headed south from there. Looks like December will end up around 12.5 million visits. Here we are a week away from one of the biggest votes the Democrats have faced in a quite some time and this site is on a downward trend. Now this will be approximately the same number of visits as in Dec 2006 so its not a year over year decline (the data only goes back to 12/06). But last December we weren't about to "Pick a President" as Hillary is saying these days.
I find it interesting. Perhaps its because there isn't one common problem (e.g. Bush/Cheney). Perhaps people are buying into the myth that no Republican can win this year. Perhaps people have political fatigue (I do). Perhaps people have more blogging options? Candidate diary fatigue? Has Dkos peaked? Anyway, I thought it was interesting. But I like numbers.
I know that back in 2004 and 2006 I was on this site constantly and visited probably 10 times a day. That is rare now. I expect that my attendence will probably drop off significantly again after Feb 5th or thereabouts. Has your Dkos behavior changed? Any predictions for the future?
Update [2007-12-28 11:26:13 by onemadson]:
Now that this is up on the rec list I wanted to point something out. Many people are saying traffic is lower due to the holidays. While that may be true traffic has trending down since August (here are the numbers in millions).
Aug 16.8
Sept 14.1
Oct 13.3
Nov 12.9
Dec 12.4
I do think that there is a limited number of people who will be online activists. I'm wondering whether we have reached Peak Kos. But I don't think that this is just related to this site. Other blogs might pull some people away from Dkos and grow bigger but I don't see any others growing to this size. Not enough activists to go around. Just something I was thinking about and then the dkos traffic numbers showed an interesting trend.
Update [2007-12-28 12:15:26 by onemadson]: One other thought is that perhaps the fact that in most states primaries don't matter makes a lot of people tune out until the general election. Sitemeter doesn't allow us to look at this info but it would be interesting to look at the geographic location of the pre-primary visitors vs. the pre-general visitors.
