Conservative Blogs Gained Readers as Lib Ones Stagnated in 2007

A frequent lament I've heard in conservative circles is that we're not as good at using the Internet to promote our message as the Left is. Of course, that fear may be a bit overblown to begin. After all, 2007 saw some marked success in conservative blogs growing in readership while liberal ones stagnated according to Simon Owens of Bloggasm:

It has long been understood that the largest liberal blogs have generally produced more web traffic than the largest conservative blogs. But I have noticed a general trend over the past few months that I didn’t want to write about until the end of the year. After surveying the traffic stats of many major political blogs, I found that web traffic for several major liberal blogs either declined sharply or stayed the same while major conservative blogs saw a sharp increase in traffic.

For consistency, I only included blogs that used the Sitemeter web traffic measurer. For each blog, I added up the web visits (sometimes referred to as unique visitors, though this term can be misleading) of the first six months and the next six months. After tallying up these figures I compared them to see if the blog’s readership increased or decreased. With liberal blogs, I consistently saw decreases, some of which were quite sharp. For the conservative blogs, I saw a significant increase in the number of visits.

Now, it’s very difficult to make conclusions based on these findings. 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.

Either way, it is certainly an interesting trend. Below you’ll see my findings, first with major liberal blogs and then major conservative blogs.

You can find more at Owens's site, including bar graphs from Sitemeter showing stats for major leftie and conservative blog sites.

(h/t Nogirlemen)

Owens is right that this trend must be taken with a grain of salt, and there can be any number of theories as to why 2007 seems to have been a better year growth-wise for some conservative blogs than liberal counterparts.

I'd argue that a Democratic Congress and the conservative pushback against its liberal shenanigans gave plenty of fodder to grassroots conservatives on the Web, and accordingly lots of great content for blogging. That seems to me a big factor in increased interest in conservative blogs, particularly as the liberal media often failed to cover stories embarrassing to the lefties in the Democratic Congress.

At any rate, 2008 should be an exciting year for the conservative blogosphere and I think I speak for all of us at NewsBusters when I say we are blessed to be a part of that and share our thoughts and analysis with you guys everyday.