Democratic candidates have twice as much traffic on their websites as do Republican candidates
Democratic candidates have raised three times as much money online as have Republican candidates
Democratic candidates have 50% more small donors than Republican candidates
Democratic candidates have three times as many friends on MySpace as Republican candidates
Democratic candidates have 25% more views of their videos on YouTube than Republican candidates, and more than twice as many views of the non-Ron Paul Republican candidates.
Generally speaking, what we are seeing here are online Democrats taking more action on behalf of Democratic candidates than online Republicans taking action on behalf of Republican candidates. To put it another way, even though studies show that Republicans use the Internet at rates equal to Democrats, Republicans are less politically active online than Democrats. This basically confirms what I predicted more than two years ago in an article titled Aristocratic Right-Wing Blogosphere Stagnating:
Last September, I wrote an article entitled Top Down Right-Wing Blogosphere Growing Powerful, that argued the anti-community nature of right-wing blogs was allowing them relatively greater message discipline than left wing blogs and a superior ability to influence the content of the national media. In January, I wrote a follow-up piece entitled Partisan Democratic Blogs Growing Far More Influential Than "Independent" Right-Wing Blogs, where I argued that progressive blogs, due to their affiliation with the Democratic Party, were growing influential in ways that the largely media focused right-wing blogosphere was not. In my latest irregular installment that compares the national liberal blogosphere to the national conservative blogosphere, I would like to discuss a new phenomenon I see emerging. The left-wing blogosphere is beginning to decidedly pull away from the right wing blogosphere in terms of traffic. This is largely a result of the open embrace of community blogging on the left and the stagnant, anti-meritorious nature of the right-wing blogosphere that pushes new, emerging voices to the margins.(…)
Unless right-wing blogs decide to open up and allow their readers to have a greater voice, I expect that the liberal and progressive blogosphere will continue its unborken twenty-month rise in relative traffic. Conservative bloggers continue to act as though they are simply a supplement to the existing pundit class, without any need to converse with those operating outside of a small social bubble or any need to engage people within the new structure of the public sphere. In the formulation of Stirling Newberry, they view themselves existing on top of a pyramid rather than in the middle of a sphere. At least when it comes to the national blogosphere, liberals are leaving conservatives in the dust. By comparison, conservatives seem all too happy to continue to cogitate from atop their lofty and increasingly irrelevant perch.
But Free Republic simply could not succeed in the world of the blogosphere, social media, and Web 2.0. The founders made the decision that they were going to hoard as much traffic on their servers as possible, by posting full-text articles (that eventually got them slapped with high-profile lawsuits from WaPo and the LAT). Early on, links to blogs were verboten. If you expressed your own opinion when starting a thread, that was a “vanity” and it was frowned upon. And fundraising for candidates was strictly forbidden, except for those pet causes approved by Jim Robinson. Their culture was very anti-blog and anti-original content.(…)
And the media focus also fits the frame of conservative bloggers as pundits rather than activists. If we act as pseudo-journalists and commentators, it stands to reason that we’d think actually getting involved on a campaign is dirty business.(…)
My concern with some of the sites I discussed above is that for ten long years, they haven’t been giving our people Web experiences that teach them how to be more than simple readers.
Thank you for making my point more than two years later. It is also true that my prediction turned out to be correct, both in terms of activism and traffic. Just after I wrote the piece, both the Huffington Post and Dailykos surpassed Free Republic and Townhall in terms of traffic, and have never looked back since. Whatever the questionable value of Alexa may be as a traffic tool, it is a useful way to compare larger websites according to a single metric. Looking at that metric, one can see that, starting in June 2005, Townhall was first passed by Dailykos, and then by the Huffington Post. By the middle of 2006, both sites also passed Free Republic, and have never looked back. It is worth noting that Democratic Underground, while it caught up to Free Republican in page views, appears has suffered from many of the same Web 1.0 problems as Free Republic. As such, it has been passed by not only Dailykos and the Huffington Post, but the more interactive Townhall is now also virtually its equal.
Perhaps most importantly of all, it is worth noting that none of these five major websites have improved on their position from August 2005. Every single one of them is either long-term stagnant, or in what appears to be long-term decline. This is despite the greater level of political news at this point in the election cycle compared to two years ago. Now, we are less than six months away from selecting new presidential nominees, but back then, major elections of any sort were over a year away. Traffic should be better now, but it isn’t. This might point to the overall lower level of interactivity offered by blogs compared to the broader world of Web 2.0. Right now, web traffic growth appears to come from enormous sites that allow users to micro-search for their interests, such as YouTube and MySpace. By contrast, individual blogs, even large blogs, are much more focused and topic specific. Even if the possibility I suggest above is wrong, and the blogosphere is able to continue to grow as a whole, this may spell difficulty in terms of growth for individual blogs. After all, it is the overall blogosphere that is more like YouTube or MySpace, and no individual blog can ever hope to match. This is bad news for bloggers struggling to find a means of independent support for their endeavors. We may quickly discover that the “short head” of Web 2.0 is even more exclusive, and has even higher entry costs, than previously envisioned. In the new online political frontier, both Dailykos and Free Republic might both be competing with sites like MySpace, rather than with each other. In terms of pure capital, that is a struggle that neither can ever win.
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