But Politico’s traffic losses appear to be part of a year-long trend on the political left. Media Matters For America’s website, for instance, lost 56.83 percent of its unique visitors between November 2010 and November 2011. In the same 12-month period, Talking Points Memo lost 41 percent, Wonkette was down by 32 percent, Gawker declined by 31 percent, Salon decreased by 22 percent and progressive blog Daily Kos shed 18 percent of its unique visitors.
See, Site∙me∙ter∙en∙freu∙de, noun,
“deriving pleasure from the failure of other bloggers to generate traffic”
See also related conditions, Blogger Mood Disorder, Bloggernoia.
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Comments
Wow, this despite Rush Limbaugh regularly citing Politico pieces. Normally he drives overloading traffic to websites.
I tried politico for a while but it wasn’t very compelling. That was way before the 80 stories in 80 days on Cain’s alleged 80 girls. They think they have a monopoly on the truth like time magazine in the 80’s, but once you get duped and realize tithe, second and third attempts are just annoying.
Point taken.
Ah ha, this is what a Clinical Law Professor does! Interesting!
Sounds like disenchantment has set in. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch…
Awwwwwwww ………..
Trouble in paradise. It is heartbreaking.
They revealed their true nature early in the campaign.
That’s a shame. Although, nothing of value was lost.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light…
Those numbers are pretty typical for the party in power. I suspect there’s a corresponding increase in traffic on right-leaning sites.
Now, when Republicans take back the White House (hopefully in January, 2013), you’ll see those numbers rebound on the Lefty sites.
It’s typical.
Seriously, unless you’re committed to what they’re spewing at such places, why would you go back? It’s the same tripe over and over. And in the case of Politico, they have been purveyors of the same conventional wisdom that you can get anywhere else. You rarely learn anything new there.
Internet versions of the Time and Newsweek pamphlets, perhaps? Quick, someone get Carlos Slim on the phone.
The reason your blog is successful, you have a sense of humor and the ability to not be “deadly” serious on every issue and boringly predictable. Cheers. Merry Christmas!!!
[…] Prof Jacobson […]
I’m grateful for LI’s respect for logic and reason, expectation of evidence for assertions, and the way the author’s positions and conclusions are clearly taken only after vetting and investigation, while anything based on less is accompanied by the proper caution. There is a strong, if wry, sense of humor that is perfectly tuned for the long term reader.
While every blog hits the top stories, I appreciate LI’s selection of secondary and tertiary stories from the broad range always available. You can’t report everything, so this is a bit of an art. Good choices are also made between which stories get a brief description and a link, and which require a mini-essay’s worth of set up and explanation. The LI instinctively knows a little something about ‘dosage'( aka reader attention span). Employing a sports analogy, a blog’s strong choices among second and third level stories and how to bring them creates its strong ‘bench’, its depth of quality, and will ultimately separate it from the competition.
The presentation is strong, concise, and well written. The author eschews flowery or hyperbolic prose and avoids logical fallacy like broken glass on the beach. The language is never inpenetrable. Whereas most other conservative blogs mostly endorse (massage?) my held positions, at LI I find the same deep core issues supported, but it often happens my views on more peripheral issues get challenged and even my core positions will get a nudge from time to time.
Perhaps I shouldn’t write such a post after drinking a quart of egg nog and a pot and a half of coffee.
I have only two small suggestions to make:
1) Declare LI a MEGAN McCAIN FREE ZONE and get the word out. You’ll triple unique hits in a week. And if there’s a God, it will go viral and soon every conservative site on the web will join the zone. It’s your ticket to the conservative blogger Hall Of Fame. We’re talking first vote.
2) I was prompted by fernstalbert’s post to voice a little sugar for LI, but it got away from me. There is much for any reader to be grateful here. My suggestion is that the author set aside a thread, after Christmas, before the New Year, titled: “What Do You Think Of Legal Insurrection?” inviting readers to respond in the comment section. If humility or modesty threaten the idea, I’m sure there will be a number of less than complimentary remarks. It’s not a love magnet post – I’ll bet anybody ten thousand dollars folks would like the opportunity and that the author will too.
Along with the egg nog and coffee, I’ve eaten about 27 different kinds of homemade cookie today. 28 including the one I’m eating as I type.
When I first created my sporadically-updated blog in 2005 out of mind-numbing boredom at work, I signed up for a free sitemeter that said nobody visited my site even on the days I updated it. Heh. I wasn’t going to pay for one, so I just kept on as if I was writing for one person out there, somewhere (cue the An American Tail theme).
Eventually Blogger came up with an internal counter, and the good news is that I got more hits than I ever could have guessed (especially on days I comment at sites like Legal Insurrection, Hot Air, and Patterico). but I don’t trust the Blogger count — when I use a Tiny.CC shortcut linking to a new thread and tweet it, I get dozens more hits listed by Tiny than shows up on the Blogger meter.
Weirdest thing to me is that of all the hot political topics I’ve discussed over the years, the threads that most consistently get views on a daily basis are on the subject of David Letterman’s adulterous affair, and a snarky open letter I wrote to ABC News’ ace fluff piece reporter, Yunji de Nies. Apparently, a lotta fellas are smitten with her.
Oh, I almost forgot: I noted in 2009 that Politico, after soaring in the numbers of its visitors up to the 2008 election, dropped like a rock in the months afterward while AOL’s Politics Daily site shot up like a rocket.
I made this observation to disprove Jonathan “Is Rick Perry Dumb?” Martin’s insincere suggestion that Sarah Palin should have simply ignored web-borne false rumors her marriage was ending because they weren’t repeated in “legitimate” media, and his further assertion that denying the tabloid rumors granted gave “legit” publications like Politico an excuse to repeat the rumor (as if they weren’t looking for a reason). In the thread, I showed that sites like Politics Daily and Huffington Post (which both published the rumor) had larger readership than “legit” Politico, and there already was a track record of internet Palin slander leaping from email and YouTube to Time‘s Joe Klein to NBC’s Brian Williams and ABC’s Charles Gibson.
I’m sure Glen Reynolds had a schadenboner when he read about the Daily Caller’s Sitemeterenfreude.
There is something satisfying in seeing those who punch below the belt lose. Though, of course, there is the warning about not rejoicing when your enemy stumbles. (Prov. 24:17)