For the first time in its history, Maryland Politics Watch has been the most-visited state political blog in Maryland over a four-month period.
From October 2008 through January 2009, here are the most-visited political blogs in the Free State according to Sitemeter:
1. Maryland Politics Watch: 45,654
2. Red Maryland: 43,022
3. Baltimore Reporter: 19,570
4. Annapolis Capital Punishment: 18,988
5. Pillage Idiot: 17,376
6. Monoblogue: 15,162
7. PG Politics: 14,988
8. Howard County: 14,928
9. Free State Politics: 12,547
10. Annapolis Politics: 7,367
11. Brian Griffiths: 6,387
A few notes:
1. The above list only includes blogs that are focused on state and local politics. We do not include local blogs that are not primarily political in content. We examined them here. We also do not include national blogs or MSM sites.
2. Many blogs do not reveal their Sitemeter statistics. O'Malley Watch would almost certainly be one of the leaders if the anonymous author released its visit counts.
3. Pillage Idiot and Free State Politics have stopped publishing.
4. Brian Griffiths and Michael Swartz of Monoblogue cross-post on Red Maryland.
5. Kenny Burns of Maryland Politics Today stopped disclosing his Sitemeter counts after we revealed that his blog was one of the least-read political blogs last summer. His statistics cannot be verified without publicly-available, third-party verification from Sitemeter or a similar service.
6. Sitemeter counts do not include Google Reader subscribers. The leading state political sites on that measure are MPW (112), Red Maryland (68), Free State Politics (63), O'Malley Watch (50), Howard County (49) and Maryland Politics Today (22).
7. MPW ranked number one in November, December and January, breaking a 12-month leader streak by Red Maryland.
8. We expect Red Maryland to resume its top rank in the near future because it has a large number of bloggers from all over the state and is the last refuge for Maryland conservatives. But the gap between the top two political blogs and the rest is significant.
Update: PG Politics blog now discloses its visit counts and we include them above.
Update 2: Kenny Burns of Maryland Politics Today is protesting his exclusion from this list even though he admits deleting Sitemeter. Burns says the following about my attempt to verify his counts:More importantly, his claim of revelation from last summer was more than likely based on an email he sent me in August, shortly after my site's relaunch, which said:
When Burns employed Sitemeter, it reported a combined visit count of 8,133 from February through June of 2008. His new statistics report a combined visit count of 68,365 for those months. None of this passes the smell test. Or the laugh test.
“Mr. Burns, I don’t see Sitemeter up on your blog anymore. Did you disconnect it? I am collecting data for a possible update to my Maryland Blogdom series on Maryland Politics Watch.”
More than likely, I did not reply to this email, not because I didn't want to, it's due to the fact I get dozens of emails a day and I cannot keep up with them all.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
MPW: Most-Visited State Political Blog in Maryland (Updated)
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3 comments:
It's no wonder. The content of MPW is interesting, compelling, and exceptionally well-written. Congratulations!
Adam Thanks very much for the plug and for collecting these stats based on SiteMeter. As the publisher of Annapolis Capital Punishment, I am pleased to be in the top tier of this club but I must admit that the numbers don't mean a whole lot. The page views or site visits are just one type of statistic--one of many bellwethers about a blog's popularity. It does not take into account the many "o second" visits due to search engine crawlers or the average duration of a visit, among the many examples as to why the bottom line numbers you cite just don't mean a whole lot.
To use an analogue,if each blog were a storefront along a street, would we count the number of passers-by, the numbers of those who briefly stopped to window-shop, the numbers who walked in and walked out or those that browsed, picked up merchandise and left? Or would we simply include those that bought something? And then, would we include how much they spent, how many of a particular item they purchased or what the costs of sales was for the item or items purchased? Imagine if it were a jewelry store. Would 500 earrings sold be counted as 500 times more than one diamond ring? Of course buying an earring may take a minute or two, but the diamond sale could have been in the works for months.
These analogues are but flawed models, but I think I have made my point.
Finally, I am not competing against other blogs, especially those that are just ideological trash. The numbers that count most to me are trends at the one blog I control--and those stats are looking very good. That's what interests me. Again, I am pleased to be recognized, and thankful for it, but it's just not that meaningful.
Far be it from me to rain on the parade, but at this level of traffic, these distinctions don't mean an awful lot. Yeah, 100K a month vs. 5K a month means something, but 6K a month or 10K or even 15K is effectively the same as 5K a month.
For Pillage Idiot to be ranked fifth based on traffic is silly. No one ever actually read Pillage Idiot, except maybe me, and sometimes even I didn't bother to read it. My traffic figures tell us nothing. Monoblogue, on the other hand, is a serious blog with serious analysis, and there is no way in the world it should be ranked below mine. Assuming the traffic figures are correct, it just shows they aren't worth the zeroes and ones they're written with.
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