Web Traffic to Washington Times, Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh.com Is Down;

[chat_noir]

Web Traffic to Washington Times, Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh.com Is Down; Is Era of Right-Wing Site Popularity Over?

During the past three months, for instance, http://rushlimbaugh.com traffic ranking has declined 18 percent. He still huffs and puffs away daily on radio, but advertisers might want to double check the size of his audience. If the bottom has dropped out on him online, it likely has had a similar trend line with his radio show.

Even Fox News, that gold standard of right-wing media, is down 13 percent. Here are the numbers: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.foxnews.com

Ann Coulter is coining money by attacking widows and orphans -- a new game for her since she's run out of Democrats, living and dead, to defame and verbally pillage. You would think with all of the attention the promotion of her new book has given her would raise visitor numbers at her Web site, http://anncoulter.com. Nope. Traffic there is down 10 percent.

The audience chart reversal seems to be common across the entire right-wing side of the Internet viewing board. Billoreilly.com -- http://billoreilly.com -- has dropped 40 percent in the past three months. Townhall.com -- http://townhall.com -- that once popular center for right-wing news and commentary, has fallen by 24 percent. The Washington Times Web site is down by 27 percent. And Matt Drudge, once the hottest right-wing name in Internet sites? Alexa.com says http://drudgereport.com is down 21 percent.

Could it be that Internet users are getting tired of political sites in general? Maybe so. But http://moveon.org is up 13 percent in the same period.

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=68506

[meegbear]

1. Let's keep this trend going ...

if you goto a site like drudge.com, instead of telling us to go there, put the story here. The less clicks, the better.

[TacticalPeek]

2. K&R

:kick:

[Viva_La_Revolution]

3. I can't get in to Alexa

:shrug:

http://www.alexa.com/

[rinsd]

5. Don't. Its spyware

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-31,GGLD:en&q=spyware+alexa

[Viva_La_Revolution]

6. I was just going to look at the homepage... not install it

I do have a few pebbles left in my gourd. :)

[rinsd]

9. Sorry....reflex

I had alot of trouble with the site as well.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

11. no problem

thanks for looking out. :)

[rinsd]

4. Alexa is crappy spyware and to cite them is as embarrassing

as someone citing an internet poll.

[rinsd]

10. Ignore this....I make a detailed post below.

[Breeze54]

7. Yes!!!

:woohoo: :woohoo: :woohoo: :woohoo:

I guess all "the fucking morons" are beginning to get the message? :sarcasm:

That would be a great thing!!

I read this report last night and it said that O'Lielly was down 40%!!!
:applause:

[rinsd]

8. A littel context

I'm not a fan of Alexa as I have already made known. I do not think very much of their rankings either since they are based on who has an Alexa toolbar installed.

Here is Alexa's explanation of the percentages being quoted

"Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa expresses reach as number of users per million. Alexa's one-week and three-month average reach are measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified time period. The reach rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on their reach. The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current reach and reach rank with its values from three month ago."

Reach rank is a big factor here and may be a bit misleading when it comes to actually traffic numbers. It seemed that most of the rw sites traffic numbers were up and down but basically in a consistent range.

"Could it be that Internet users are getting tired of political sites in general? Maybe so. But http://moveon.org is up 13 percent in the same period."

This actually doesn't prove anything. Look at moveon's traffic numbers they are okay but not exactly domninating. Also DU is down 9%. And Dialykos is down 10%. DU get about 10 times more traffic than moveon and dailykos gets about 30 times(though those numbers are according to Alexa so who knows how vaild they really are). Some good news with a caveat, freerepublic's numbers are down 19% and their traffic looks like it has ebbed in the last 6 months. Again these are Alexa figures so who the hell knows how accurate they are.

Drudge and the rest of the rw go up and down. Their charts actually look like the needle getting pegged on a lie detector test. :evilgrin:

This does annoy me though. No investigation beyond a cursory one to prove the results that were desired in the first place.

So the moral of the story is it appears some political websites are losing traffic to non-political websites but a much more in depth investigation is needed.