Circumnavigating the gatekeepers

This report from John Hawkins may help explain why I’ve always been so amused by those who attempt to dismiss me and other WND writers by claiming we write for a fringe news site that no one actually reads. I don’t know how reliable the Alexa stats are, but I have occasionally been privy to WND’s server stats over the past few years and WND had more daily readers than some major metropolitan newspapers had daily subscribers three or four years ago:

1) Fox News: 260
2) Wall Street Journal: 383
3) The Drudge Report: 748
4) New York Post: 888
5) WorldNetDaily: 2,692
6) Newsmax: 3,264
7) Free Republic: 3,988
8) The Washington Times: 4,717
9) TownHall: 5,986
10) The Rush Limbaugh Show: 7,624

The truth is that one’s media profile doesn’t always reflect the size of one’s actual online audience. Judging by the regular appearances by its contributors on Fox, you would think National Review was massive, but it’s primarily influential in a world of politics that only represents about one percent of the total national audience. It’s also interesting to see that the Mises Institute did so well. Of course, as we saw twenty years ago in the world of talk radio, that which the dominant form of media attempts to marginalize will tend to steal the audience from that media as new technologies provide a means of circumnavigating the gatekeepers.

Speaking of which, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is now defunct, mourned by no one who didn’t receive paychecks from it. Hopefully the demise of the San Francisco Chronicle will soon follow.

“And as the other papers fail into the Web we will hear, again and again, about the Internet, about Craigslist, about The Drudge Report, and a hundred other reasons these papers are dead. What we will never hear is that their editorial policies and news slanting were part and parcel of their demise. We will never hear about the willed insults, slights, and snubbing of fully half of their potential circulation pool. Journalists and editors write a lot about “taking personal responsibility” when it comes to others. You never hear them write that about themselves. There’s no mea culpa among liberal newspaper journalists these days. There’s only “The Internet ate my newspaper.”

Speaking of the Internet, since Blackfive averages twice as many visitors as Vox Popoli I assume this blog would probably rank somewhere in the top 150 right-wing sites. It’s hard to know, though, since so many “big” blogs with lots of links elect to hide their Sitemeter numbers, which I suspect means that their daily readerships aren’t quite as big as their feeds and links would lead you to believe. Another odd thing I noticed is how much longer visitors tend to linger here than they do at other, better-trafficked blogs. For example, the average visit to Pharyngula is 8 seconds. The average visit to Blackfive is 69 seconds. The average visit here is 140 seconds. Having a large audience is great and all, especially if you’re trying to generate ad income, but I much prefer people taking the time to read what I write. And if they happen to have anything interesting to add to the discourse, so much the better.