Last month I wrote a diary where I noticed a disturbing trend for a political blog like this one:
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?
Here’s the Alexa graphic in question:
The drop in site ranking wasn’t caused by the holidays or DK5 — it started well before either of those kicked in.
But, you say, forget about site ranking — what about actual site traffic? Hasn’t that gone up during the year just past?
Nope. Not at all.
The graphic that adorns the top of this diary is a screenshot of the Quantcast figures for the period of January 20, 2015 through January 19, 2016. And it shows at best flat if not negative growth over the past 365 days. In fact, the biggest traffic days were all in the spring and summer.
And again, DK5 had little or nothing to do it. I strongly suspect that ugliness — the sort that’s driving off longtime Kossacks and dominating the Wreck List — probably does. Longtime Kossacks leave, and passersby peek in and immediately turn away.
UPDATE: By the way, here’s the site traffic for the period from November 14, 2007 (the farthest back I could get the Quantcast data to go) to June 19, 2008. This covers the most heated part of the 2007-8 primary wars, and aside from the few days in mid-December when the site was down, site traffic was rising throughout that entire period: