Saturday, October 25, 2008

Huffington Post Beats Drudge

Democrats are winning in the polls — and also online.

Liberal political blogs are proving to be big beneficiaries of the election news cycle. According to a report from Pew Research Center, 43% of liberals say they’ve read political blogs while thinking about the horse race, compared with 22% of conservatives. The study was conducted last week among 2,599 registered voters and found that blog readership across the political spectrum was 27%.

That’s good news for top liberal blog HuffingtonPost, whose September 2008 traffic more than quintupled from September 2007 to 4.5 million uniques, based on data from comScore.

It leapfrogged Drudge Report, which had 2.1 million unique visits, up 70% from a year ago. (Matt was far ahead of Arianna last year, with 1.2 million unique visits to 792,000, respectively.)

The biggest jump was Talking Points Memo, which got its start during the Florida recount in 2000. It saw traffic soar from 32,000 uniques to 458,000, a more than tenfold increase. Daily Kos quadrupled to 923,000.

But conservative sites also climbed, particularly RedState, which grew sixfold to 235,000 unique visits. Traffic to Townhall.com and Michelle Malkin’s blog doubled.

Sites in the middle include Politico, which launched early last year, and RealClearPolitics. They too saw big increases in traffic, ending September with 2.4 million and 1.1 million unique visits, respectively.

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