Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Liberal Blog Readership Drops?

The wonderfully named Bloggasm has an unscientific study showing web traffic at liberal blogs decreased during the second half of 2007 while conservative blog traffic increased.

The study is unscientific because there's no comparison between last year and this year (which would be a better way of monitoring traffic). Now that Bloggasm has this as a starting point, it will be interesting to see what happens next year.

I don't know if traffic slowed at liberal sites or not, or if traffic picked up at conservative ones. If it did, there could be lots of possible explanations for it (as some commenters pointed out).

One idea I had was that the Democrat takeover of Congress was such a disappointment that many people may have simply stopped reading liberal blogs in disgust (I think this could have happened with conservatives during the last part of 2006, as well). But that hypothesis doesn't explain the corresponding increase in conservative blogs. Perhaps conservative blogs are just getting more interesting. In any event, it could be interesting to watch over the next year or two to see if this really is a trend.