Missed hits: Pensito Review Editor-In-Chief Jon sweats the Web site traffic numbers every month. He crunches them, massages them and analyzes them to ascertain how many above-average people visit Pensito Review and how many stick around to read its insightful and occasionally irritating content.
Just the other day at the watercooler, he was lamenting to Trish and me about how our traffic numbers were down in July and are likely to be down again in August. We tried to make him see that it’s the summer and people are away at the beach or the mountains or whitewater rafting or watching “Snakes on a Plane” instead of seeking out trenchant political and cultural commentary on the Internet. But Jon was not to be consoled.
Yet, as it turns out, like George Bush’s polling numbers, traffic at conservative Web sites is plummeting at a much higher rate than the dozen or so folks who failed to visit Pensito Review in the past month (you know who you are). According to National Journal’s Technology Daily, conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly of Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor” has experienced a 50 percent drop in traffic to BillOReilly.com since March, when it had more than 100,000 visits for every 1 million Internet surfers to below 50,000 in August.
And it ain’t just Billy-boy — other wingnuts are losing readers, too.
Traffic to blond blatherer Ann Coulter’s site is off 16 percent over the last three months. Rambling Rush Limbaugh has seen his site traffic drop 14 percent, and The Drudge Report has fallen 10 percent.
While all weblogs seem to be off their peak this summer, red ones are doing worse than blue ones: RedState traffic is down 28 percent; Right Wing News dropped 20 percent, Blogs for Bush was down 13 percent and Townhall dropped 14 percent.
Readership at the liberal Huffington Post is down 14 percent, and at Daily Kos, the most trafficked blog, traffic is down 12 percent. Some liberal bloggers saw gains, however — MyDD is up 9 percent, as is Alternet, and Virginia’s Raising Kaine grew 119 percent over the past three months.
The Democratic National Committee was down 24 percent, but the Republican National Committee doubled that at 48 percent fewer clicks.
Pundits trying to fathom the traffic drain have resorted to arcane explanations:
“The collapse of Bush’s political standing and the growing public reaction against the war in Iraq appears to have produced an asymmetry in cyberspace that, together with other consistent evidence, bodes well for a strong national Democratic tide,” Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, said of the traffic numbers.
So don’t feel so bad, Jon, it’s just a passing asymmetry in cyberspace that should clear up about Nov. 8.
I knew it couldn’t be our fault!
Down from when? If we’re comparing to August of 2005, it’s no wonder everyone is down. Last August was a stellar month for news, if not for Louisianians and Iraqis and Floridians and people with the last name Sheehan.
It’s the third quarter media dip that always occur in the summer. Is network viewership up or down? Is newspaper readership (not subscribers – readership) down? Is radio down in the summer (adults not 12+)? No one is watching. In the cold weather states they are outside enjoying the weather. In the south, they’re heading to cooler climates.