Blogs Competitive with Cable News On the Web

by Chris Bowers, Wed Sep 08, 2004 at 12:48:08 PM EDT

Over the past thirty-one days, the ten most trafficked political blogs, Dailykos, Instapundit, Atrios, Josh Marshall, Little Green Footballs, Wonkette, Political Animal, Teagan Goddard, Captain's Quarters and Real Clear Politics (listed in no particular order), totaled just over 28,000,000 unique visits. This compares favorably to the website traffic of the three 24/7 cable news networks:FoxNews.com had 5.7 million unique users in May, compared with 22.3 million for CNN.com and 21.1 million for MSNBC.com. Particularly amazing is that Dailykos, with around 7 million unique visits over the past 31 days, now has a higher monthly website traffic than Fox News. Coooohhhll.

By 2006, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the top ten blogs have a combined traffic significantly greater than the three cable news networks combined. I can only wonder at the operating costs of these ten blogs versus the operating costs of the other three websites (100-1?).

Tags: Blogosphere (all tags)

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17 Comments

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heh
that's pretty funny, but i still can't fathom why anyone would bother to visit little green facists.
by annatopia 2004-09-08 01:04PM | 0 recs
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About time
Let's change the (media) filter a bit, shall we. Congratulations Chris. You and Kos, and Atrios, and the rest have been a God send for me and many others this election. The influence of instant particpatory news sources these blogs represent will have a marked effect on this election, and be written about (and blogged about) for years to come.

Thanks again for all the effort you put into this!

by michael in chicago 2004-09-08 01:23PM | 0 recs
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Your welcome
But I am not in the same class as those other two. Jerome is--I'm not.
by Chris Bowers 2004-09-08 01:28PM | 0 recs
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stop it!
you are not allowed to sell yourself short.  your contributions here have been much appreciated.
by annatopia 2004-09-08 01:45PM | 0 recs
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Arrgghhh
Yes, I certainly do. Damn spell check doesn't pick up mistakes like that. :-)
by Chris Bowers 2004-09-08 01:27PM | 0 recs
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Blogging is good for the health
I started my own blog (http://www.thecore4.com) about 5 months ago and since then have lost 10 lbs and seen my BP drop a few points as well.  Mind you, when I am on a rant, the BP goes up as I can feel the temples throbbing, but just participating in the blog community and knowing I am not alone has been a lifesaver.

I read Kos, MyDD, and Body & Soul on a daily basis (OK, maybe I read Kos hourly!) and I really think the 'blogosphere' has given us humans back the old concept of the Agora - allowing us to learn of and comment on the news instead of just being passive drones.

Thanks!

by Tito 2004-09-08 01:37PM | 0 recs
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Re: Blogs Competitive with Cable News On the Web
i wonder how markos feels about being more popular than FAUX news?  that's gotta feel good.  ;)
by annatopia 2004-09-08 01:42PM | 0 recs
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Hmmm...
...let's ask good ol' www.alexa.com :

mydd.com : 122,077th
dailykos.com : 9,155th
foxnews.com : 423rd
msnbc.com : 1,234th
cnn.com : 38th

And two other (general interest) forums I frequent:

fark.com : 1,648th
genmay.net and genmay.com : 50,698/23,549 (same site, both domains commonly used)

My guess: People stay on the blogs longer (get more pages) than the news sites.

by Geotpf 2004-09-08 02:00PM | 0 recs
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Re: Hmmm...
The news sites you mention are attached to larger corporate sites. Thus, their traffic is artificially inflated in those rankings.

Also, website traffic is not a science. Its guestimation.

by Chris Bowers 2004-09-08 03:45PM | 0 recs
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Re: Hmmm...
Well, Alexa is scientific, IMHO.  Basically, everybody who downloads and uses thier toolbar gives them data on which sites they visit.  It's a poll of sorts.  Whether or not errors crop into the poll (because people who use thier toolbar may not represent the internet as a whole) is possible, although I can't see them favoring the corporate sites over the blogs.  I don't see anybody going to any domain that ends in cnn.com who wasn't looking at a CNN article of some sort, even if linked from, say, a blog like this.  Some blog-like sites score high-Fark is fairly blog-like, and is definitely non-corporate.
by Geotpf 2004-09-08 11:32PM | 0 recs
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One more rating system...
Using Google's PageRank (found using thier toolbar), which is a geometric scale of the number of links to a site (with high ranking sites contributing more PageRank to other sites), the sites I listed get a:

mydd.com: 6
dailykos.com: 7
foxnews.com: 8
msnbc.com: 8
cnn.com: 9
fark.com: 8
genmay.com: 5
genmay.net: 5

These rankings pretty much match Alexa's (especially if you consider this is a geometric progression of some sort-getting from a 7 to a 8 is much harder than getting from a 6 to a 7).

I think your original numbers may have been incorrect...

by Geotpf 2004-09-08 11:46PM | 0 recs
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blogs
There's also a big qualitative difference between the kind of people who visit blogs and those who visit sites like Fox News.  Blog junkies are much more likely to be politically engaged as voters, financial supporters, and activists.  The 7 million visitors to Kos represent a more significant and politically effective demographic than the 7 million who might visit one of the mainstream media sites.
by global yokel 2004-09-08 02:53PM | 0 recs
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"7 million visitors?"
What constitutes a "unique visit" for the purposes of this metric?  

My office, for example, uses dynamic IP addressing, so if I visit dailykos seven or eight times during the day to see what's new, it's not clear that those visits are necessarily recognized as being from the same person.  

I know that I visit blog sites more frequently during the day than I do 'traditional' news sites, and I'd expect that other people do as well.

It may be that -- no matter how good the numbers sound -- that the number of distinct human beings that visit dailykos is still substantially smaller than the number that visit CNN or F*X.

by osterizer 2004-09-08 03:39PM | 0 recs
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A Long Time Coming...
This may be premature, as others have noted. But the trend is unmistakeable. And not the least surprising. The cables are all style, no substance... and their style ain't that much to write home about.  Blogs are increasingly information rich, and will only grow moreso over time.

This election may truly be a major turning point--not the cause, but the effect of a much deeper shift, of which the Dean campaign was only another prominent effect. The deeper shift is the maturing of the long-heralded lateral potential of the internet, finally connecting with a large enough slice of Americans from all different walks of life.

We've come a long way from usenet!

by Paul Rosenberg 2004-09-08 09:18PM | 0 recs
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Re: Blogs Competitive with Cable News On the Web
I had an interesting exchange with Dean Esmay somewhat related to this at Crack the Bell.
by timkelly 2004-09-09 08:11AM | 0 recs
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highlighting good stories
The big difference is that the blogs highlight the good stories and connect them in a narrative.

Ironically, it's national consolidation that has gotten the networks in this fix. Each network only has one national face. If they drift to the right, they are accused of bias. If they drift to the left, they are accused of bias. If they seize upon an accurate and factual story and pursue it, they are accused of bias. Their (in hindsight, inevitable) reaction has been to stop forming opinions and turning into a he-said she-said jumble of uselessness.

But ratings for the blogs and outlets like the Daily Show show that rather than a jumble of he-said she-said reporting, people want a narrative to tie everything together. They want a sense of perspective. They want A. Whitney Brown's The Big Picture. So they turn to outlets that give it to them.

by drewthaler 2004-09-09 10:29AM | 0 recs
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The truth is better than the hype
HOw interesting, considering that dailykos doesn't publish "Unique visitor" numbers.

They use Site Meter, which shows "visitors" and "page views", not UNIQUE visitors like everyone else does.

Now, kos told us that Site Meter broke because it couldn't handle the increased traffic, so he took it off his home page.

But - oops - he forgot to remove the link to it on the advertising page, so you can still see it there and - oops - looks like it's still running.

So what does it tell us?

Average Visits Per Day    457,343     
Average Visit Length    0:03 seconds

Just in case you had any doubt that "Visits" were not "unique" visits.

I'm a loooong time dailykos member, and I love that site. I just think we do ourselves no service by lying and deception, and in particular that site does not follow basic disclosure practices nor have any code of standards when it comes to actually sharing information with the people (you know, the thing we all kinda preach?)

Let's tell the truth, for better or worse, and let's build authentic grass-roots activism, not phony ego-driven hype.

by rationalist 2004-10-08 07:39PM | 0 recs

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