May 13, 2005

Traffic Jammin'

A website I've never heard of called "HundredPercenter" has analyzed SiteMeter stats for a representative sample of 100 political weblogs and found that, post-election, their traffic is down by an average 17.7 percent, but traffic at blogs overall is still soaring. [Hat tip: Jim Brown]

Recent reports indicate that traditional newspaper sales are way down and radio audiences are tuning out. One of the explanations has been the expansion of the internet, specifically the blogosphere. However, this is not exactly true.

HundredPercenter has just completed a study analyzing monthly web traffic of 100 websites, big, small, political, non-political, conservative and liberal - from November 2004 to April 2005. For most political blogs, the October-November months were their strongest, due to the elections. However, since then, many political blogs have experienced dramatic traffic decreases, while non-political blogs have enjoyed a boon.

With the exception of a few, political blog traffic has declined anywhere from 35%-84%, since November of last year. Overall, web traffic for the blogs in this study fell 17.7 %, since November 2004.

...The point of the study is to prove that radio, print and the blogosphere are all experiencing a cyclical downturn, post election. If you notice, all non-political blogs have continued to grow, while political and news oriented sites have slumped. Most likely, people are burned out from the emotional roller coaster of the elections and are opting to visit non-political blogs.

Furthermore, the overall growth of the blogosphere, year over year, is incredibly strong.

BillHobbs.com isn't among the 100 blogs checked by HundredPercenter, by my traffic is certainly down compared to August-October 2004, when election-driven political interest was peaking. Yet traffic is up compared to the same period a year ago.

In the first quarter of 2005, for example, the number of unique visitors per month here at BillHobbs.com is up 26 percent over 1Q 2004, averaging just under 30,000 per month (based on AwStats data).

In April, my blog got just 4 percent fewer unique visitors as it did in November 2004, but 42 percent fewer than October 2004.

HundredPercenter should redo his chart. I suggest he compare each site's 1Q 2005 traffic average to its 3Q 2004 average.

Here is my SiteMeter chart for the last year. What you see is a peak in October, followed by a fairly steady decline through the holiday months and the beginning of the new year, then what looks like the beginnings of a new upward trend in March and April.

Instapundit's SiteMeter chart shows a somewhat similar pattern, as does Daily Kos's chart,