Markos' recent
snarky tip of the hat to Bill O'Reilly's falling viewership numbers tipped me off to a pretty cool feature of the web--the (nearly) ubiquitous site meter. (I know, I know--"welcome to the internet, n00b!" and all that...)
He linked to a pretty cool graphic--Daly Kos' monthly page views over the last year:
That got me interested: With all of the talk about political blogs recently, and with the prominence in the MSM for certain right-of-center blogs such as Powerline and Little Green Footballs--How does dKos stack up against the competition?
More:
The answer is "Pretty damn well".
Powerline:
http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=s15rocketman&report=33
Little Green Footballs:
http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=s18littlegreenfootballs&report=33
And, for good measure,
RedState.org:
http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=s13redstate&report=33
Just a quick tally of the site visits for April gives dKos a lead of 11 million to 5 million when you combine all three of those sites together. The advantage is even greater if you look at individual page hits--but that is somewhat a factor of the site formats of the three sites.
(granted, I couldn't find sitemeters for some of the other important players, ie NRO and Free Republic, so unfortunately I can't compare their impact).
Other interesting things can be gleaned from this. You can see that all of the sites show a similar peak in readership right around the election, as you might expect. I think, however that the most interesting trend is shown by the slope of the graph after the fall off in political interest after the election. Powerline shows a distinct flattening of hits, while the other blogs show a rising trend (strong in the case of dKos, and less well defined in the case of RedState and LGF--at least to my qualitative eyeball analysis).
The point of this diary? Well, I guess I just thought that we were a few voices crying in the wilderness. Listening to the MSM you might get that impression. But, in the 'alternative media' I was surprised at how powerful a voice dKos really is.
And with the quality of the analyses and discussion I have found here, I expect our voice to grow even stronger.