One of the sentiments I saw expressed during yesterday's meta discussions is that "no one in D.C. reads blogs anyway." This idea has been phrased both in a cynical / depressive manner ("no one who matters is reading us, so what does it all matter anyway?") and in somewhat nastier terms ("no one who matters reads Open Left, so Open Left doesn't matter.") Well, rest assured that Washington D.C. has, by a long way, the most political blog readers, per capita, of any city in the country.
Take Open Left as an example. Google Analytics reports that, since July 11th, 2007, the day we installed the service on our website, there have been 8,597,437 visits to Open Left, and 2,551,798 absolute unique visitors (and 16,788,540 page views, fwiw). Among states, the District of Columbia (not the metro area, just the District itself) actually ranks 7th, with 317,460 visits, behind only, in order, California, New York (a surprisingly close second), Illinois, Texas, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Among cities, only New York City has more visits to Open Left, with 462,980 visits between Manhattan and Brooklyn combined. Manhattan and Brooklyn have, however, about 8 times the population of Washington, D.C.
If you take the typical 30% ratio between visits to Open Left and absolute unique visits to Open Left, then there have been about 105,000 unique visits to Open Left in Washington, D.C. over the past 19 months. If you further consider that only about 27% of the 700,000 jobs in Washington, D.C. are related to politics, that is roughly half of all D.C. political employees. Now, consider that Open Left consistently ranks about 15-20th in terms of audience size among progressive political blogs--and that the progressive blogs larger than us are often vastly larger--and you start to get a grasp of just how frequently political blogs are read in Washington, D.C.
Political blogging, especially progressive political blogging, is a major news medium in Washington, D.C. On a per capita basis, progressive political blogs are more frequently read in D.C. than anywhere else--and by a long, long way. People in D.C. are reading what you post here. How much of an impact it has is entirely open to question, but it is getting read.
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