The following blog item concerns blogging. That makes it "meta." If that's not your thing, scroll down.
It's taken as a given that interest in politics reaches a zenith around November of even-numbered years. Political blog traffic tends to spike, big name bloggers eat caviar and buy Mercedes and live the good life. Then on, say, November 5 traffic drops off and it's back to ramen noodles and riding the beat-up Schwinn.
Sites entirely focused on election-related number compiling and crunching are particularly susceptible to the cycle described above. Hence, Nate Silver is worried about traffic at his site and did some investigating:
You can see that Nate's site has retained a bit more than half of his pre-election traffic. I duplicated Nate's method for a few more sites on the left and right:
Openleft.com 174%
Mydd.com 85%
TheNextRight.com 83%
FreeRepublic.com 75%
Talkleft.com 68%
HotAir.com 64%
Now, I hope, for Openleft's sake, these numbers have some validity although I agree with Nate Silver in this:
Any number of caveats apply -- including that Alexa.com estimates are usually pretty blunt insturments(although they're a little bit better for relatively large sites like these). But you see the sites running along something of a spectrum from campaign-specific to general political (and sometimes cultural) interest.
At any rate, it appears the week's "All Lieberman all the time" strategy paid off big time (<---snark) (<---meta snark).
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