Liberal vs Conservative Blogs

Wizbang blogged Chris Bowers at MyDD attempts to divine some meaning from BlogAds traffic. I've framed the title post in the grand terms he used when looking at blogosphere traffic in his stories. While I don't completely disagree with his findings, I do have issues with his methodology and conclusions.

First it's worth addressing his critique of top conservative bloggers for not creating communities.

Of the twenty-four liberal blogs in the top quintile, Dailykos, TPM Cafe, Smirking Chimp, Metafilter, BooMan Tribune, MyDD, and Dembloggers are full-fledged community sites where members cannot only comment, but they can also post diaries / articles / polls. By comparison, there are no community sites among the top twenty-four conservative blogs. None, zip, zero, nada.

I'll let the world in on the two big secrets of Scoop.

1. It's a shitty blogging tool. There are, as best as I can tell, maybe two or three good features in Scoop (diaries being the main one), and the rest of the mess is a horrible blogging tool. What RSS feeds, trackback, custom layout? Scoop doesn't do trackback, the RSS support is confusing and rudimentary, and all Scoop blogs tend to look the same because it's not real easy to design a layout for.
2. You can't get the version of Scoop in use at DailyKos. One of the cool features (reader recommended diaries) isn't in the Scoop available from kuroshin.org.

   And basically a diary is just a personal blog that the user can have, but which is under the complete control of the blogger (DailyKos) hosting it. If you don't believe that, sign up as a DailyKos user, and then post something conservative, and see how long it remains visible, and how long your login is good.

   In fact there's been very little public activity on the Scoop development site, while sites led by DailyKos have been implementing all sorts of new features. Why is that, you might ask? It's because Scoop has become, in effect, a bought and paid for tool of the elite partisan liberal bloggers. Scoop development is occurring, funded by Kos and others, and the by product of that work isn't available to you the lowly blogger. There's nothing wrong with Kos and crew keeping the good stuff for themselves while the open source Scoop stagnates, it's just innocuous to suggest that conservative bloggers should be rushing to adopt a feature poor, stagnant product when there are plenty off good blogging tools available.

   I don't even agree that Scoop, even the one used by DailyKos, is a good blogging tool. I much prefer others I have tried.

As to the traffic generated by Scoop sites, Bowers says, "Anyone who spends a significant amount of time on Scoop blogs should not have any difficulty figuring out why this is the case." The problem with that statement is that anyone who examines Bowers methodology and has a basic understanding of web advertising and Scoop should be able to easily identify his error. BlogAds traffic statistics measure page views not unique visitors. Since a site like DKos is a traffic vacuum (sucking in and keeping traffic from the wider blogosphere) it's easy to see how their page view counts keep puffing up. I've examined the top 100 sites at the TTLB Ecosystem based on SiteMeter traffic in the table shown below. The SiteMeter comparisons show traffic to the top liberal blogs is 20% higher than the top conservative blogs, but even Bowers admits there are considerably more conservative blogs in the mid-tiers. My guess is that if you were to extend my numbers on down into the 200 range the liberal and conservative traffic would be essentially equal. If you were able to extend the traffic calculation even further down the ecosystem the total traffic for conservative blogs would quickly surpass liberal blogs due to the higher number of conservative blogs. Using a power law curve I'd estimate that were you able to do the traffic calculations into the 1000 range conservative blogs would hold a 10%-20% traffic edge.

Here's how Chris views the right side of the blogosphere:

There are swarms of new conservative voices looking to breakout in the right-wing blogosphere, but they are not even allowed to comment, much less post a diary and gain a following, on the high traffic conservative blogs.

A few conservative blogs don't allow comments, and a few dont have trackbacks, but very few don't have either one, and many have both comments and trackbacks. And I would much rather have my own blog, where I can control comments, trackbacks, and the look and feel of the blog, than a diary controlled by some other blogger.

Instead, without any fanfare, they are forced to start their own blogs. However, because of the top-down nature of right-wing blogs, new conservative blogs remain almost entirely dependent upon the untouchable high traffic blogs for visitors. In short, the anti-community nature of right-wing blogs has resulted in a stagnant aristocracy within the conservative blogosphere that prevents the emergence of new voices and, as a result, new reasons for people to visit conservative blogs.

Those "untouchable" high traffic blogs do a damn site more linking to new voices than the liberal communities. Bowers forgets to mention that with traffic on the left converging on a few mega-sites (that by and large do not support smaller liberal blogs by linking to them) they are actually harming independent liberal voices.

But that is the liberal way. Control by a few, and expected obedience by everyone else.

It's not just me (the right-wing blogger) saying that, look into recent controversies among smaller lefty bloggers trying to get a little credit from the big liberal bloggers. There's plenty of new new voices emerging on the right. How do I know this you may ask? Look back at listings of the top sites from 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years ago. The cast is ever changing, blogs rise and blogs fall.