Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere-rept from Bowers (MyDD) & Stoller

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http://www.ndnpac.org/npi/blogreporthtml.html

Excerpt:

V. The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere

In the past two years, the political dynamics of the Internet have reversed themselves. According to research conducted by MyDD.com, as of July, 2005, the ninety-eight most trafficked progressive blogs totaled an amazing 15,181,649 page views per week, an average of over two million daily page views. That is over five times the size of the entire political blogosphere just two years ago.

By way of comparison, the top one-hundred and fifty conservative blogs had less than ten million page views per week during this period, and just over one million unique visits a day. In less than two years the progressive blogosphere had grown from less than as big as the conservative blogosphere, to nearly double its size.

Nowhere is this rise more apparent than in a direct comparison of the largest progressive and conservative sites. As previously discussed, two years ago, Instapundit was three times larger than any other blog. However, as of July, 2005, the largest progressive blog, Dailykos, received more than four times as many montly visits.

It’s important to remember that Instapundit is still growing. Over the last two years, it has almost doubled the size of its audience. However, over the same period, Dailykos, now easily the largest political blog in the world, has increased its audience nearly thirty-times over.

Other aspects of the digital political world reflect the same trends. The prominent message boards Free Republic (conservative) and Democratic Underground (progressive) are two of the largest online political centers. While Free Republic has been long understood to be the largest political community on the web, over the past two years, Democratic Underground has almost entirely closed the traffic difference with its conservative rival.

Progressives were not the early adapters to online communication. But they have become, in the parlance of Malcolm Gladwell, “The Early Majority.”

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