looking at the Blogads traffic
rankings. Adding up the 200 blogs that are concerned with politics and
either identify or have been identified with Democrats / liberals or Republicans / conservatives, I found 87 blogs that general fit into the "liberal" category and 113 blogs that fit into the conservative category. However, despite the greater number of conservative blogs, the liberal blogs totaled nearly ten million page views per week, while the conservative blogs managed just over six million. I have been tracking the comparative audiences of the two blogosphere off and on for the past nine months, and this is the largest lead for the liberal blogosphere that I have ever found. In
September, the margin in favor of Democrats was 25%.
In winter, it was 33%.
In the spring, it
was 50%. Now, it has risen to 65%. This is particularly amazing, since less than two years ago the
conservative blogosphere was at least twice the size of the liberal
blogosphere.
So the liberal blogosphere is beginning to pull away from the conservative blogopshere in terms of audience size. At the same time, there appear to be more conservative blogs than liberal blogs. In fact, when it comes to total number, new Republican / conservative blogs might even be outpacing new Democratic / liberal blogs. What could be the cause of this?
The answer that seems most likely to me is community. Take a look at the
breakdown of the 200 blogs I surveyed by quintile:
1-40 41-80 81-120 121-160 161-200Of the twenty-four liberal
Lib 24 16 14 13 19
Con 16 24 26 27 21
blogs in the top quintile, Dailykos, TPM Café, Smirking Chimp, Metafilter,
BooMan Tribune, MyDD, and Dembloggers are full-fledged community sites where
members cannot only comment, but they can also post diaries / articles / polls.
By comparison, there are no community sites among the top twenty-four
conservative blogs. None, zip, zero, nada. This is particularly stunning when
one considers the importance of the Free Republic community to the conservative
netroots. While it would appear that there are hordes of Glenn Reynolds
wannabe's among conservatives in the netroots, Redstate.org sticks out as the
only success story for a community oriented blog within the conservative
blogosphere. In fact, of the five most trafficked conservative blogs (over
200,000 page views per week), only one, Little Green Footballs, even allows
comments, much less the ability to actually write a diary or a new article.
The nine liberal community sites I listed in the paragraph above have
accounted for the bulk of the exceptional growth of the liberal blogosphere over
the past two years. In the summer of 2003, Dailykos was roughly equal in traffic
to Atrios, and had less than half the traffic of Instapundit. However, starting
with a large growth spurt following the introduction of Scoop in October of
2003, now Dailykos has grown to three times the size of Instapundit and four
times the size of Atrios. Over the past year, Scoop sites Dembloggers, MyDD, and
BooMan Tribune have risen from miniscule traffic numbers to top forty, even top
twenty, blogs. Over the past two weeks, the traffic at Talking Points Memo and
TPM Café has risen to a combined 1.3 million, making it easily the second most
trafficked political blog (comfortably passing Instapundit). In fact, the
introduction of the community oriented TPM Café has more than doubled the
traffic at TPM of late. Overall, while both the right-wing and left-wing
blogosphere have seen growth in traffic, the truly exceptional growth of many
community sites on the liberal end of the blogosphere has made the difference
that catapulted the liberal blogosphere from half the size of the right-wing
blogosphere in July 2003 to more than 60% its size in June 2005.
Anyone who spends a significant amount of time on Scoop blogs should not have
any difficulty figuring out why this is the case. Because of Scoop's diary
feature, it is possible to become at least a semi-famous blogger without having
a blog of your own. An entire generation of popular liberal bloggers grew out of
the Dailykos diaries and comments: Billmon,
Steve Soto,
Steve Gillard,
Melanie,
DemfromCT,
DhinMI,
Theoria,
Tom Schaller,
Meteor Blades,
DavidNYC,
myself,
SusanHu,
Jerome a Paris,
lapin,
Maryscott O'Conner,
NYCO,
Mariascat, and many,
many more. I believe that the wave of new talent and fresh voices that the
comments and dairy options bring to a blog has been the key factor in the
liberal blogosphere outpacing the growth of the right wing blogosphere. Every
day brings more reasons to read the highly trafficked liberal blogs. Every two
weeks or so brings a new liberal blog from someone who has already become famous
as a diarist. Community moderated blogging platforms such as Scoop have provided
us with an excellent means of finding new voices, and these are the voices that
are generating the accelerated growth in the liberal and progressive blogosphere
when compared to the right-wing blogosphere.
By comparison, right-wing blogs have pretty much only one means of finding a
new voice in the blogosphere: when someone starts a new blog. The inability to
operate within a community must be the primary reason behind the large number of
conservative blogs in the second, third and fourth quintiles of the Blogads
traffic rankings. In fact, of these 120 blogs, 77 of them are openly
conservative / libertarian. There are swarms of new conservative voices looking
to breakout in the right-wing blogosphere, but they are not even allowed to
comment, much less post a diary and gain a following, on the high traffic
conservative blogs. Instead, without any fanfare, they are forced to start their
own blogs. However,
because of the top-down
nature of right-wing blogs, new conservative blogs remain almost entirely
dependent upon the untouchable high traffic blogs for visitors. In short, the
anti-community nature of right-wing blogs has resulted in a stagnant aristocracy
within the conservative blogosphere that prevents the emergence of new voices
and, as a result, new reasons for people to visit conservative blogs.
Unless right-wing blogs decide to open up and allow their readers to have a
greater voice, I expect that the liberal and progressive blogosphere will
continue its unborken twenty-month rise in relative traffic. Conservative
bloggers continue to act as though they are simply a supplement to the existing
pundit class, without any need to converse with those operating outside of a
small social bubble or any need to engage people within
the new structure of the
public sphere. In
the formulation of
Stirling Newberry, they view themselves existing on top of a pyramid rather
than in the middle of a sphere. At least when it comes to the national
blogosphere, liberals are leaving conservatives in the dust. By comparison,
conservatives seem all too happy to continue to cogitate from atop their lofty
and increasingly irrelevant perch. That's fine by me. I hope some things never
change.