Over at the (awesomely named) Bloggasm, Simon Owens writes that "May ‘09 political blog readership 53% lower than it was in October ‘08." Among "left-of-center blogs," for instance, traffic at Daily Kos is down 69% since October, with Firedoglake down 44%, Open Left down 69%, and MyDD down a whopping 80%. Overall, Owens finds that traffic at 10 of the leading left-of-center, national political blogs fell 64% between October 2008 and May 2009, from 119 million to 42 million page views. For comparison purposes, traffic at 10 leading right-of-center, national political blogs fell 37% between October and May, from 87 million to 54 million page views.These statistics are interesting, as they demonstrate the drop-off blogs see after presidential elections. These particular numbers show what happened between October 2008, when political blog traffic was at an all-time high as the Obama-McCain election wound down, and May 2009, when we were well into the "making of sausage" phase of government once again. It's not surprising that people would be more interested in an exciting presidential election - and this past year's was one for the history books - and the often tedious process by which are laws get made. What I find more interesting, in some ways, is what's happened to blog traffic since election fever died down, in December 2008. Here are a few page view stats, taken from public Sitemeter data (note: I'm a big fan of blogs having public Sitemeters):
Daily Kos
December '08: 24.5 million
May '09: 25.3 million
Crooks and Liars
December '08: 3.4 million
May '09: 3.9 million
Firedoglake
December '08: 2.5 million
May '09: 2.5 million
Americablog
December '08: 1.8 million
May '09: 1.6 million
MyDD
December '08: 0.9 million
May '09: 0.5 million
As you can see, since December 2008, the trends are much different than looking at a starting point of October 2008. For instance, Daily Kos traffic is up slightly, while Crooks and Liars is up about 15%. Firedoglake is flat, while Americablog is down about 12% and MyDD down more than 40% (this one is somewhat surprising, although it does focus more exclusively on elections than other progressive political blogs).
Here in Virginia, where we have elections every year and where the governor's race has been drawing a lot of attention, traffic is much more robust than on the national blogs. For instance, pageviews at Not Larry Sabato actually increased sharply, from 113,592 in October 2008 (and 89,587 in December 2008) to 148,750 in May 2009. Here at Blue Virginia, traffic tripled from 21,517 page views in February 2009 (when the blog was established) to 68,459 page views in May 2009. At Blue Commonwealth, page views were about flat, from 69,499 in January 2009 (when Blue Commonwealth was established) to 63,410 in May 2009. Just for comparison purposes, RK got 338,803 page views in October 2008 and 263,038 page views in November 2008.
