[conservative in nyc]

Yes there's more competition from sites like fark and digg. But all of those sites have also seen declines in the past three months as well. In fact, U.S. news sites in general are seeing fewer readers AS A PERCENTAGE OF INTERNET USERS, which is what Alexa primarily measures. Page views are relatively flat - some up some down:

Percentage change of % Internet Users (Last 3 months):
Digg -12%
New York Post -12%
Fox News -19%
Chicago Tribune -20%
Free Republic -23%
CNN -23%
Houston Chronicle -23%
NY Times -24%
Fark -24%
MSNBC -28%
Wall Street Journal -29%

Percentage change of % Page Views (Last 3 months):
Digg +13%
Fark +9%
Fox News +8%
Houston Chronicle +6%
New York Post +3%
CNN +2%
Chicago Tribune 0%
Wall Street Journal -3%
Free Republic -7%
New York Times -8%
Huffington Post -9%
MSNBC -11%
Moveon.org -17%
Daily Kos -18%
Democratic Underground -25%

As you can see, the lefty sites are getting creamed in that metric.

The real growth is coming from sites like You Tube (+28%/+11%) and social networking sites like Facebook (+42%/+11%) and, to a lesser extent, MySpace (+10%/-1%).

You also have to remember that Alexa measures users worldwide. The U.S. Internet market is relatively mature. As more non-English speaking foreigners get on the Internet, U.S. sites will fall in the percentage of Internet users visiting the site metric.

By the way, if the Alexa results are to be believed, Free Republic has a pretty large international following. Only 68.3% of users are from the U.S. - believe it or not, fairly comparable to the New York Times and CNN.

[conservative in nyc]

For the sake of completeness, here's how the big conservative blogs are faring in the page views metric (last 3 months):

Instapundit +9%
Pajamas Media +7%
Powerline 0%
Red State -4%
Michelle Malkin -7%

Fairly similar results, and all better than Moveon.org, DU or Kos.

[conservative in nyc]

One more note: page views is technically page views PER USER, which might not be the best metric to measure things if the total number of users is falling.

[Steve Van Doorn]

All true.

I believe we need to keep up with what is taking place on the net. Maybe add a section in the hot issues blue area on the right of just videos.

Right now if you want to find video’s that someone put together you have to do a search for them and even then you might not find some.

Sometimes I just don’t feel like reading… video's are great for that, just set back and watch.