I Was RightAnd everybody around here knows how much I hate saying that, right? (Crickets)
John Hawkins posts on the blogosphere traffic on the left and the right, based on a post
by Chris over at MyDD.
You may recall that I
took a look at an earlier post by Chris on blogosphere traffic about a month ago.
Second, it certainly looks to me like Kos is absorbing the left-wing of the blogosphere. It's ironic that the poster at MyDD was making a big thing about them catching the righties because of their sense of community, when his community was suffering the biggest drop in traffic since the election of any of the blogs. It's quite possible that Kos' big jump since New Year's has come at the expense of many other liberal blogs.
Third, Instapundit may be losing his traffic to smaller right-wing bloggers. Certainly I suspect a lot more people go to Power Line and CQ directly these days rather than waiting to see the link from Glenn.Well, here's what
Chris has to say:
The conservative advantage in smaller blog traffic is tremendous. In fact, for blogs ranked 67-250, conservatives hold a whopping 1,469,730 to 861,827 weekly page view lead over progressive blogs (70.5%). Even more stunningly, the conservative blogs ranked 67-250 make up 21.5% of all conservative blogosphere traffic, while the liberal blogs ranked 67-250 make up only 8.3% of all liberal blogosphere traffic--a five to two edge in favor of conservatives. Clearly, smaller blogs are a much, much more important part of the conservative blogosphere than they are a part of the liberal blogosphere.Get it? Traffic is spread more widely around the conservative blogs, with a much larger percentage of the total blog readership at smaller conservative blogs, than is the case among liberal blogs.
John Hawkins scratches his head at this claim:
Now, right now you may be asking why this is important. Who cares if conservatives are leading among smaller blogs--that means that liberal blogs have an even larger lead among large blogs, right? While that is certainly true, it is also true that the smaller a blog tends to be, the more locally focused it tends to be.John replies:
Furthermore -- take it from someone who knows the right side of the blogosphere extremely well -- percentage wise there just aren't all that many significant right-of-center blogs that spend a lot of time hammering "local issues."Yep. This is a smaller blog, but you'll almost never hear me talking about AZ issues. It's not that I'm disinterested in them; it's just that the market for those issues is a lot smaller than the market for the latest posts on the Rove controversy.
John goes on to remark on why conservative blogs have a bigger impact:
So if we're talking about a story that fascinates the left side of the blogosphere, it probably caught the attention of the mainstream media at the same time and the MSM has the resources and contacts to cover it more thoroughly. The two exceptions to that have been the unimportant Jeff Gannon story and the Downing Street Memo, which is never going to amount to anything. In those two cases, the MSM could have taken those stories and run with them, but they weren't interested enough to do so (*** Some people might also include the Trent Lott story, but it was Instapundit, not any of the liberal blogs that did most of the heavy lifting on that one ***).This is a theme I have turned to often in the past. Right-wing bloggers are competing against a very small cadre of conservative investigative journalists--Claudia Rosett and Tom Lipscomb come to mind--while the lefties are competing against every other media outlet in the land. Even if you're a Daily Kossack, you think you can beat Mary Mapes (formerly) of 60 Minutes on Bush's National Guard duty? She spent 5 years working that story. Nobody in the blogosphere has spent 5 years on any story.
