Per the web traffic measurer Alexa, January 2015 for Daily Kos began with traffic (and thus its traffic ranking) still tailing off from its 2014 midterm highs. However, this turned around dramatically in the second week of January, and the site’s traffic ranking kept advancing at roughly five hundred spots every three months for most of the next nine months.
But, then, in the middle of September, just as the primary races on both the Democratic and Republican sides were starting to heat up, site traffic rank improvement suddenly stalled. It stayed stalled, with only slight up-and-down movement, for the next four weeks — then, in the second week of October, started a steady downhill slide, even as the primaries came ever closer.
What caused this slide in the site traffic ranking of a political website, even as the primaries drew nearer?
Not the holiday season — the plateau kicked in right after Labor Day, and the dropoff during the middle of October. The holidays might have exacerbated it, it but it had existed beforehand.
Not DK5 — that didn’t commence until November 8. (Again, though DK5 might have exacerbated it, it was a slide that was already in existence before November.)
I strongly suspect that as a certain type of diarist started to take over the Rec List with multiple (and often rotten) diaries in a day, much in the manner of FDL or MyDD, that has caused a number of other, saner persons to bail from the site.
In the cases of MyDD and FDL, the exodus was permanent — and devastating. Let’s hope that this isn’t the case with Daily Kos.
We’ll likely find out in the next few weeks.