Most of Daily Kos’ 47 employees gathered this week in Oakland. Most of the staff works remotely, so this is our annual chance to get together, meet each other or see old friends, learn about the company’s successes, and plan for the future.
This is truly an amazing group of people, fewer than 50, yet building an operation that reaches tens of millions of people (no exaggeration). So with all the non-Bay Area folks flying home today, it seemed like a good time to share some of those accomplishments.
DIVERSITY
One of our key operational goals is to have a staff that reflects the demographic composition of the Democratic Party coalition: browner and more female. While we haven’t quite met our goals, we’ve made great strides in the past two years. Here are our latest stats, including a new hire starting in a couple of weeks:
Total |
48 |
Female |
28 |
Male |
20 |
People of Color |
14 |
White |
34 |
Pacific Time |
27 |
eastern Time |
15 |
Mountain/central Time |
6 |
Of our eight departments (News, Elections, Activism, Community, Technology, Social Media, Data and Business), four are led by women, though both the CEO (me) and President are men. Of those ten senior positions, two are led by people of color, including the entire company (me, again!).
I decided to take a look at staff reporting to women, and once you take out the ten people in senior leadership, it was 14 reporting to women, and 24 reporting to men. That doesn’t include “middle management”, and it certainly doesn’t include Neeta’s army of community assistants or Susan’s contributing editors, which together number in the dozens.
One reason for the disparity is the tech department—a field famous for being heavily bro-dominated. But even there we buck the trend. Our technology team is 12 people strong, five of them women and three four of them people of color. Tech teams everywhere would kill for that kind of diversity (at least the enlightened ones).
We also have a strong LGBT contingent on staff. So while we haven’t quite met our goals (40 percent people of color or better), we’re worlds better than we were just a couple of years ago. And while it’s nice to see that diversity on paper, I can’t tell you how amazing it is to have it on staff, what that wealth of experiences and points of view bring to the organization. I can’t imagine doing it any other way, and I honestly can’t figure out how other organizations do without it. We are exponentially better at doing what we do because of it.
Oh, and for context, in 2014, our employees were 19 male, 13 female, and just seven were people of color. We’ve come a long way.
TECH PRIORITIES
I’ve talked previously about our tech agenda: finish porting over the site to Rails (things like internal messaging, the story stream, user profile pages, search, group publishing queues, etc), offering traffic metrics to everyone so they can see how well their stories are being read, revamping the groups functionality, etc.
Having finished the (bulk of the) port to DK5 and squashed the most disruptive bugs, we are pushing off most of the stuff above to focus on these next three priorities:
1. Fixing the WYSIWYG story editor. Right now, there are still some discrepancies in how one’s story/diary looks like in the composition window, and how it looks when published.
2. Scaling! As you’ll see below, we are blowing away all past traffic records, and if history is any guide, traffic might be up to three-times as high come September. Now, past results are no indication of future performance, so we may not get that kind of extreme bump, but we have to be ready for it. That means continuing to bolster our infrastructure so that we can provide flawless service on even the highest-traffic days.
3. A new elections portal. In reality, this is the thing that is slowing down all those other priorities—we’re taking advantage of this election cycle to build the election portal of our dreams, showcasing the efforts of our data team, and featuring candidate and race profile pages. So we have an all-hands-on-deck focus on this project for the next several months, leaving a small team to continue working on Daily Kos scaling, bugs, and some smaller-scale projects. This election portal will also feature technology that we can repurpose later for a similar focus on legislation and legislators.
TRAFFIC
Holy crap our traffic…
It’s kinda hard to read, but March 2016 traffic is tracking at 15 million unique visitors and over 63 million pageviews. See that bump in the middle? That was October 2012, the last presidential election year, where at our peak we hit 5.9 million uniques. The 2008 election? It’s that first bump all the way on the left, or 1.8 million unique visitors. At the time I thought that was a shit-ton of traffic, and I was right. We’re in a whole different world now.
As I write this, Quantcast has us as the 125th largest site in the United States, out of all the millions of websites in the world. We are ahead of Gawker, MSNBC, NBC News, Bloomberg, NBC.com, TwitchTV, CNet, and the Onion. We are just a sliver behind Rotten Tomatoes, Salon, and TMZ. Depending on the day, we might be ahead of those guys too (and we were earlier this week). That’s a pretty elite neighborhood, and the trends continue to point up, up, and up.
COMMUNITY
Our on-site engagement is also up—comments, blog posts, and recommends. Prior to the primary engaging for real, we averaged 300-375 stories/diaries a day. At the height of the primary season (late February through early March) we were at around 650 per day. That has now slowed down to a still-heady 450-500 per day. Obviously, part of that decline is the ban on malicious attacks on the presumptive nominee (whether you recognize her as such or not). But even accounting for that, we are still well above our numbers from last year.
Regarding comments, we hovered around 10-11,000 per day last year, we were at 22-24,000 during the peak, and now that’s gone down to … 17-22,000. Part of that might be people finding greener pastures elsewhere, or it might just be a natural result of the primary winding down. It was hard to beat the 1-2 punch of Super Tuesday and the other Super Tuesday two weeks later. States are now all strung along, and with the math being the math, much of the drama has left the contest. (On both sides, actually.)
In any case, let’s look at some community stats:
Distinct author: 65,596
Published diaries: 1,063,162
distinct commenters: 151,888
total comments (all time): 60,460,549
total diary recommends: 34,019,404
total comment ratings: 134,636,913
total groups: 1089
Most recommended diarist: Meteor Blades, 414,456 recommends
Most recommended commenter: Yasuragi, 812,482 recommends
Most diaries: kos, 13,913 (!!!)
Most comments: Gooserock, 167,545 (!!!)
Most comments on a diary: 8,118, Mojo Friday - Sungha Jung - Edition, TexDem
most recommends for a diary: 2298, A Palin convert, trenttsd
Total user accounts: 1,488,820
Total non-banned user accounts: 708,414 (non-spam or trolls)
Total non-banned users who have posted a comment or diary: 127,094
Jan 2015 total comments: 231,594
Feb 2015 total comments: 227,509
Jan 2016 total comments: 456,600
Feb 2016 total comments: 627,514 (!!)
Feb 2015 distinct commenters: 9,639
Feb 2016 distinct commenters: 14,751
If past election cycles are any indication, we’ll get a “pause before the storm” effect through the spring and summer, before things explode after Labor Day. Still, the early conventions and Donald Trump being Donald Trump may shake that up. We’ll see.
BACK TO STAFF
Remember, we have a staff that still numbers less-than 50, yet they support a site with tens of millions of pageviews every month, and a community that is hundreds of thousands strong. In a just world, our staff would be 10 times as large to support that kind of size. So the fact that they accomplish so much is a testament to their effectiveness and ingenuity. I am lucky to have them.
COVERAGE
There has been some complaints about our heavy focus on Donald Trump lately. People will say things like “it’s clickbait!” Eh, not really. Here are the top 10 most read stories on the site for the month of March:
1. Trump rally no joking matter
2. Pope fires Vatican ambassador to US over Kim Davis
3. For those who had any doubt, Kansas has officially gone insane
4. There is a major carbon monoxide explosion on the West Coast
5. Why Donald Trump will never be elected in one Tweet
6. Republican defense attorney’s Twitter rant goes viral and rigthly so
7. Al Franken gives hilarious retort to Republican SCOTUS obstruction
8. Worst Debate Ever And an embarrassment to the nation
9. Meet the Democrat whose pissed off Obama so much the president is backing his primary opponent
10. Mitt Romney’s announcement today shows just how desperate Republicans have become to stop Trump
Four of those stories are about Trump (including the GOP debate, which is about all the clowns on the GOP side). If we were metrics driven on the front page, then we’d have less Trump, maybe limit him to 40 percent of our coverage. But we cover Trump because he’s going to be the nominee and it’s important for people to realize just how fucking nuts that is. And yeah yeah, the Daily Kos community already knows this, but this stuff gets read outside of the community, so it’s important to spread this information far and wide so that everyone knows it.
But that list is also interesting for another reason—we are heavily promoting ALL content on the site, including the stuff you write. Look at those stories above … only four were written by staff members, none of them top-five. We make sure ALL the good stuff gets distributed via our headlines email (which goes out to about a million subscribers) and our social outlets, particularly Facebook. Believe it or not, but 20-30 million people see our content on Facebook every week.
So I’m not particularly sympathetic to arguments that we should cover Trump less, but I am sympathetic to arguments that we should cover other stuff more. We’re kicking around ideas on that front, and we hope to start rolling some new features out over the next few months.
As always, thanks a million for everything you do for Daily Kos and your country. It’s gonna be a long, hard, ugly year. But think about it—when all’s said and done, it’ll all be worth it because we’ll keep the White House, win the Senate, reduce the GOP majority in the House, and most important of all—flip the Supreme Court.
Oh, and let’s not discount Donald Trump’s concession speech. That alone will be worth the price of admission!