Posted on 09/28/2007 8:53:03 PM PDT by Rennes Templar
Over the last few months here at RWN, my favorite blogs have been ranked, I've had other people rank their favorite blogs, and I've regularly listed the web pages that send me the most traffic. Today, I thought it might be interesting to see which political websites actually receive the most traffic. So I picked a number of popular political websites from both sides of the ideological spectrum, sprinkled in a generous helping of popular blogs, and then I went to Alexa.com and ranked the 50 political websites that I came up with. Do keep in mind that...
1) Every popular political website isn't included. If anyone was left out, my apologies, it wasn't intended. But, I had to cut the list off at some point or we would have ended up with a ridiculously large list.
2) Alexa can't properly read all the Blog*spot pages so they all receive the same rank. Because of that, none of them were included.
3) Last but not least, Alexa sometimes cannot distinguish between the main page and secondary page of a website. For example, Alexa gives Eric Alterman's blog the same ranking as MSNBC which meant I had to leave out a few blogs of interest that were hosted on much larger pages.
All 50 websites are listed with their Alexa rank following their link. So for example, a "1" would mean the page was the most popular website on the net. A "100,000" would mean the 100,000th most popular page on the net. With that being said, let's go ahead and take a look at the rankings.
***Update***: Due to popular demand, I've decided add another 50 political websites to the list. This should give a much more complete picture of the most popular political websites out there.
1) The Drudge Report: 338
2) Salon: 754
3) Time: 802
4) World Net Daily: 973
5) Newsmax: 1358
6) Free Republic: 1,830
7) The Rush Limbaugh Show: 2646
8) National Review: 2,989
9) Indy Media: 3,166
10) U.S. News & World Report: 3,202
11) The Christian Science Monitor: 3,212
12) The Village Voice: 3,575
13) Town Hall: 4,050
14) Opinion Journal: 4,046
15) Antiwar.com: 5,695
16) Jewish World Review: 5,705
17) Lucianne: 6,112
18) Front Page Magazine: 7,286
19) What Really Happened: 7,562
20) Common Dreams: 8,102
21) Etherzone: 8,965
22) The Democratic Underground: 10,107
23) Vdare: 10,444
24) Alternet: 10,841
25) Counterpunch: 11,021
26) The Nation: 11,082
27) Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish: 12,890
28) Neal Boortz: 13,235
29) The Weekly Standard: 13,491
30) Zmag: 14,207
31) Cybercast News Service: 14,307
32) Reason: 14,448
33) The Cato Journal: 14,954
34) Buzzflash: 15,616
35) World Socialist Website: 15,755
36) Roll Call: 16,226
37) New Yorker: 17,673
38) Mother Jones: 18,206
39) Instapundit: 19,478
40) Ann Coulter 20,573
41) Michael Moore 21,555
42) The Heritage Foundation: 21,675
43) Real Clear Politics: 21,977
44) James Lileks': 23,560
45) American Conservative: 24,040
46) The New Republic: 27,284
47) The American Prospect: 29,284
48) Newsfilter: 30,838
49) Little Green Footballs: 31,529
50) Talking Points Memo: 32,521
51) Tom Paine: 33,230
52) Media Research Center: 34,804
53) Middle East Media Research Institute: 35,389
54) The Obscure Reading Room: 36,457
55) Insight Magazine: 39,837
56) Bartcop: 40,939
57) Too Good Reports: 41,599
58) Infoshop -- Your Online Anarchist Community: 41,766
59) The Smirking Chimp: 46,858
60) This Modern World: 47,623
61) The Progressive: 51,320
62) Right Wing News: 51,578
63) International Answer: 55,118
64) Democrats.com: 55,556
65) The Hill: 60,924
66) Tech Central Station: 64,290
67) Media Whores Online: 69,567
68) Ifeminists: 72,431
69) The Washington Monthly: 72,460
70) Daily Kos: 77,766
71) Brutal News: 78,532
72) A Small Victory: 80,905
73) The Daily Howler: 80,995
74) The USS Clueless: 83,902
75) The Nando Times: 85,863
76) Capital Hill Blue: 86,296
77) Political Wire: 87,152
78) Ken Layne: 95,384
79) The American Spectator: 95,658
80) Enter Stage Right: 97,367
81) ZCPortal: 97,377
82) Newsweek: 97,576
83) Matt Welch: 101,880
84) Human Events Online: 105,599
85) Overlawyered: 108,929
86) Rachel Lucas: 120,664
87) Asparagirl Lives Here: 121,471
88) Oliver Willis: 122,888
89) Bush Country: 125,691
90) Samizdata: 127,405
91) Virginia Postrel's 'The Dynamist': 129,261
92) The Eagle Forum: 130,092
93) Amish Tech Support: 133,591
94) Anil Dash:143,659
95) Daily Pundit: 147,682
96) Talk Left: 156,622
97) Vodka Pundit: 158,066
98) Asymmetrcial Information: 185,358
99) Blacksheep News: 293,423
100) Mike Malloy: 408,568
BUMP!
Odd numerical placement.
Informative post!
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As if we didn’t know this already.
There’s no way DU ranks above the KOmmies at Kos.
And Time and Newsweek that far apart??
This list is suspect.
Salon???
You can check the results yourself at Alexa.
I’ve heard Alexa is not that acurate. That it depends on a toolbar or some other method on people’s desktop. Given the rankings, I’m still think the list is mistaken.
Alexa is generally not recognized for being particularly accurate in its estimates. It only recognizes IE users with a certain toolbar that many consider to be spyware.
I wonder what the changes are from the last Alexis report. That’s where you start to see movers & shakers.
FR behind WND and NewsMunch. Sad.
There’s an interesting trend (from Alexa) on most major political sites downward (for overall rank and viewing) for the last two years, after steady or upward movement for the 4 years before that. Can’t explain it. Includes FR.
I don’t know. I have a hard time believing that more people read the Democratic Underground and the New Yorker than Ann Coulter.
Maybe the political sites hit saturation point. And since that time, there’s been even more of them, so the soup is getting diluted.
The trick is to follow Google’s model: Stay simple, fast, focused, be the place to go. For FR, that means keeping it as Civil as possible. People get turned off by vicious political flamewars.
Well, that leaves me out. I won’t use a virus vector like IE.
This list is really old — a lot of these sites don’t even exist anymore like Newsfilter, A Small Vistory, or Asparagirl. I would say it dates from 4 or 5 years ago. KOS is way too low and doesn’t match current Alexa ratings. There is no Huffington Post. Etc.
US News and World Report is remarkably high. Hmmmm.
I did. It doesn't match current results. It looks like this list is about 4 or 5 years old.
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