Lots of Traffic, Few Triumphs

And this week's winner in the category of "Worst Analysis of Political Blogs To Appear In The Mainstream Media" is a piece in today's Star Tribune by Mark Andrew and Patrick Lilja called Bloggers starting to dominate the political battles:

But later in 2005, conservative bloggers' supremacy began to crumble, overtaken by a progressive blogging element that seemed to materialize out of nowhere. In late 2003, Instapundit had an estimated three times more visitors than the next most popular blog of any type. Two years later, the largest progressive blog, Daily Kos, had four times more visitors each day than Instapundit. It wasn't that Instapundit had lost readers--in fact, it had nearly doubled in size during that time. Daily Kos simply outdistanced it, with its readership increasing exponentially by more than 30 times.

By the middle of 2005, the top progressive blog sites averaged more than 2 million page views per day. More importantly, however, those blog visitors were all people who sought out the sites on their own and were interested enough to take the time to stay informed. For example, one highly ranked progressive blog site, Talking Points Memo, used its newfound influence to make a particularly successful effort in rallying opponents of President Bush's plan for Social Security.

Today, progressive bloggers appear to be the frontrunners. While conservative bloggers focused their strategy on developing uniform messaging and targeted a demographic they understood well for many years, most of the progressive sites coalesced from various activist and interest groups that had been looking for similar communities. Also, the progressive bloggers greatly benefited from the demand for information to counter Bush's reelection campaign in 2004.

So that's what we've been doing? Developing uniform messaging and targeting a demographic? I must have not gotten that memo.

One would also think that with all the power and influence that these progressive blogs supposedly now have, they would have an impressive string of electoral victories under their belts. Last time I checked, they had yet to get off the schneid.