Stephen Bainbridge reports on a CNN/Money story comparing blog traffic to MSM online sites on Election Eve and Election Night. The story itself is from CNN/Money’s own blog (which is indicative of the importance of blogging in general right there) and concludes that blogs perhaps weren’t that important in 2004 after all.
Here are Wastler’s numbers:
However, not only do I agree with Prof. Bainbridge’s assessment that the impact of blogging goes beyond hit counts, the fellow who did the piece didn’t go very good research.
For example, he notes that blogspot received 333,000 hits on Election Night TypePad received 95,000. First off, I am unclear as to where those numbers came from (yes, it says comscore, but I am unfamiliar nonetheless). Second (and much more importantly) using blogspot as a measure of blogging power is not a very good place to start.
Rather, I would look at the Granddaddy of them all, Instapundit, whose Sitemeter for the week looks like this:
That approximately 420,000 hits for InstaP on Election Night is just shy of a quarter of the hits that Foxnews.com received, according to the CNN/Money numbers, and a little less than half what the nytimes.com got.
I myself had over 6000 hits that night, Bainbridge had over 7000, Outside the Beltway had over 14,500 and VodkaPundit had somewhere around 35,000–to name four blogs which sums to ~62,500. Some more: Sully had 370,000ish, Kos had 330,000ish (which is at odds with the 86,000 cited by CNN/Money) and so forth. Indeed, assuming that the 1.8 million number he cites for Foxnews.com is correct, it isn’t all that hard to look at the upper echelons of the TTLB to get to that number. Indeed, just the blogs I cited give one about 1,120,000 hits to seven blogs. (All my numbers are from SiteMeters on the sites in question).
I certainly don’t think, nor have ever argued, that blogs will supplant the MSM. However, even some casual research shows that their are quite a few folks out their acquiring at least some information from blogs on election night. Indeed, depending on the numbers in question, in may in fact be that the top blogs combined for hits comparable to MSM web sites.
Update: As per the suggestion of reader Bryan (of Arguing with Signposts), the Command Post had 190,000 hits on Election Night.
Sphere: Related ContentThe views expressed in the comments are the sole responsibility of the person leaving those comments. They do not reflect the opinion of the author of PoliBlog, nor have they been vetted by the author.
November 7th, 2004 at 8:50 pm
Apparently Blogs Drool and the MSM Rules
Or so argues Allen Wastler of CNN/Money:
November 7th, 2004 at 8:59 pm
You left out Command Post, which certainly had a lot of hits over that two day period.
November 7th, 2004 at 9:13 pm
Good point.
November 7th, 2004 at 9:14 pm
All four of the blog sites listed were getting more than that number an hour on election day. What a ridiculously poor research effort.
November 7th, 2004 at 9:32 pm
Apparently, wasted (er, wastler) got his comscore numbers from this report:
http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=513
Note at the bottom. Apparently, comscore is using some sort of survey methodology, not an actual hit count, which is really stupid, since actual hit counts are - you know - available.
Stupid
November 7th, 2004 at 10:14 pm
Blogger Bias: Big Media’s New Target!
It seems Blogger’s are in the big media’s sights now. Here is another example of their utter contempt for blogs.
November 8th, 2004 at 7:43 am
Fun with numbers
The blogosphere is in a snit over these numbers, which seem to suggest that blogs…
November 8th, 2004 at 10:10 am
Measuring Blog Influence
Steve Bainbridge points to a CNN/Money survey which purports to show that blogs have far less impact than recent media coverage has led some to think. Their finds are encapsulated in this graphic:
As Steve, NZ Bear, and Steven Taylor point out, t…
November 8th, 2004 at 10:34 am
how far we’ve come since PhoneCon I
Talk about out of the loop: I missed PhoneCon 1876 .
November 8th, 2004 at 11:45 am
Fast forward fifteen years and we, meaning bloggers, will supplant MSM. My son, daughter, and their generation will get 90% of their information and news from the internet. Using RSS feeds and bookmark tabs in my Mozilla Firefox Browser, I am able to digest new content from over 80 websites every day - in about 20 minutes.
November 8th, 2004 at 12:21 pm
The web, yes. Bloggers, no. Why? Because bloggers are analysts and commentators, not reporters (on balance).
November 8th, 2004 at 7:33 pm
I largely read blogs and ignore MSM but Tuesday all day was out working at polls and Tuesday night at victory party. Lots of your regular readers (on the right, anyway) were otherwise occupied on election night…
November 14th, 2004 at 9:25 pm
rapido