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| Fifth Column |
| Blogs: much ado about very little |
| 2004-10-15 |
| Excuse me for asking. But why has MSNBC's Keith Olbermann started a blog about politics? Almost no one reads them. These opinion-laden, e-journals draw only fleeting notice from Web surfers. But they have captured the interest of thousands of reporters who have written about bloggers and their supposed impact on the Bush-Kerry campaign. Google News, today, returned almost 4,000 citations for a search using "blog" as the keyword. "The audience reach of even the largest of the political blogs is tiny compared to other major political news sources," said Max Kalehoff, a spokesman for HitWise, a Web traffic measurement and analysis company. In a recent week, traffic to WashingtonPost.com was almost 650 percent greater than that of the most popular such blog. HitWise's rankings of half a dozen blogs tell a very quiet story. The most popular site, DailyKos.com, accounts for .0051 percent of Internet visits each day. (HitWise only reports the percentage of visits to sites/categories versus all Internet visits, or market share, Kalehoff said.) InstaPundit.com was second with .0027 percent. Even the profane and popular Wonkette.com, profiled in The New York Times, Time and the Washington Post, limps in with .0011 percent. The key to blogs' popularity in the media is not the number of readers, it's their quality. "Their collective influence seems to be because a few (writers) have become political insiders and are successfully reaching other key, intensive niche audiences," Kalehoff said. Guess where this piece came from? Give up? CBSMarkwetWatch. Hahahahahahahahahaha! |
| Posted by:growler |
| #5 650 %. That means the Washington Post, one of the Nations most important papers,with a staff of reporters and editors and photographers, etc, and over 100 years of history gets only 6 and a half times as much traffic as a Daily Kos. That my friends, is amazing news. Flabbergasting. How do you suppose Kos or Instapundit compares to a lesser paper? Or more relevantly to an opinon magazine, like Harpers, the New Republic or National Review? As for the tiny percentages of overall hits, well who cares? Most hits are to Yahoo, Amazon, local business, porn sites, etc. Whats relevant is blogs compared to news and political opinions hits overall - and im sure that looks much more impressive. Note "Their collective influence seems to be because a few (writers) have become political insiders and are successfully reaching other key, intensive niche audiences" But isnt that what mags like Harpers, the Nation, TNR, NRO, TAP, American Spect, Atlantic Monthly, Washington Monthy and Weekly Standard have always done? Does the above guy really mean to suggest that the masses watching the headlines on CBS or ABC over dinner is more important than the debates among the opinion mags? Is he ignorant, for example, of the way the networks have historically followed the news lead of the NYT, despite its having a tiny audience relative to the networks? And of the influence of the opinion mags on the NYT and WaPo? Within that large world, blogs are already important - they find stuff that sympathetic people in MSM can use. |
| Posted by: Liberalhawk 2004-10-15 4:23:50 PM |
| #4 Using this same logic, the influence of Washington, D.C. is inconsequential in the world. It's land mass is tiny, and the few thousands who visit it each day only represent the smallest fraction of the world's population. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2004-10-15 4:14:53 PM |
| #3 Nothing to worry about. Be cool. We're not here. |
| Posted by: Francis Marion 2004-10-15 4:13:37 PM |
| #2 But why has MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann started a blog about politics? Almost no one reads them. That'll still be more people that watch his TV show. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2004-10-15 4:06:53 PM |
| #1 What's a Blogger? Is it like a bugger oly blocking? |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2004-10-15 4:03:09 PM |