Via Andrew Sullivan, Bloggasm has done an interesting study of traffic at major liberal and conservative blogs. Seems readership has been either stagnant or in decline on top liberal blogs while increasing at their conservative counterparts, at least. Bloggasm proprietor Simon Owens admits that it's difficult to make guesses as to why:
It could be that the liberal blogosphere is experiencing a Long Tail effect, meaning that readers of liberal blogs are spreading out over a larger range of websites. And though liberal blogs showed a sharp decline in web visits during 2007, this isn't to say that their overall visits didn't increase compared to 2006 — it's hard to say, since Site Meter only tracks the previous 13 months.
Conservative bloggers are, of course, pleased with the findings, as is Sullivan. But I'm guessing these traffic stats don't necessarily mean what they think they mean. First, it seems entirely possible that the traffic surge at major conservative blogs might be because this election season, the Republican field has been much more divided and contentious than the Democratic field, perhaps driving more conservatives to use blogs as a resource to help them decide which candidate to back. Another factor might be changes in the dispersion of readership; historically there have been a greater number of conservative blogs on the internet with readership more widely dispersed among them and a smaller number of liberal blogs with higher concentrations of readers. Look at the stats: While DailyKos remains the most-read blog, with an average 457,160 daily views over the past month, the top 10 most-read blogs includes four conservative blogs, whose total daily visits combined still falls under that of Kos, at 438,319 visits. Studies of the political blogosphere going back to the 2004 election have shown that in not just traffic, but also prominence, power in the liberal blogosphere has been more concentrated than its conservative counterpart. Though the Bloggasm study might show traffic ticking upward among the big conservative blogs, this could simply indicate readers of smaller blogs are migrating to the bigger blogs. One would really need to do a study of, say, the top 50 or 100 blogs on both sides of the spectrum to divine whether the liberal blogosphere is really in decline. Meanwhile, the biggest lefty hitter still blows the top four right-wing blogs out of the water.
--Kate Sheppard
