Saying Good-Bye

This will be my last post on Beating the Powers that Be. A new blog Conservative Times is coming out that I will be a part of that will eventually evolve into a new journal of traditional conservative thought with some friends of mine that I met at the John Randolph Club Meeting.

My life right now is about joining with others to work together whether its at work or at home. The blog was abut selling a book and I'm simply not famous enough nor work for a larger publication to do my own blogging to have the kind of impact I wish to have. By joining with other bloggers, I can do so and use my time more effectively.

This article I found on My DD confims my thoughts on the subject:


As a blogger, one of my specialties has become the regular production of "meta" posts on the blogosphere (browse MyDD's meta and blogosphere archives here). For a long time, this specialty included regular attempts to estimate the size of the cumulative, daily audience of the political blogosphere. Since late 2005, I have seen a mounting array of evidence to suggest that political blogosphere traffic has reached a plateau, and that the nature of the political blogosphere is shifting away from a top-down content generation model toward a bottom-up audience generated model. While it is possible that the traffic evidence could be countermanded by a rising tide of traffic in during the long, slow build up toward the 2008 Presidential election, the sheer amount of evidence is becoming hard to ignore. A new era in the world of online politics is dawning.

Take a look at some of the evidence. For example, since early September of 2005, when it first reached three million daily page views on weekdays during the height of the Katrina debacle, The Liberal Blog Advertising Network has only increased in traffic by adding new members or by temporary, election related traffic frenzies. Otherwise, the combined traffic of its members has remained flat. Also, the largest progressive "blog" in the world, The Huffington Post (which is not in the LBAN), has also experienced stagnant traffic for some time now. Late 2005 was also the last time any new progressive political blogs with exceptionally large audiences were founded, as Glenn Greenwald and Fire Dog Lake entered the scene around then. Even apart from looking at individual blogs or even at the progressive, political blogosphere as a separate entity, both Gallup and Pew released data last year that strongly suggested the daily audience of all blogs had become flat after a long period of uninterrupted growth. . Further, the expected surge around the Connecticut Senate primary and November elections not withstanding, blogs and the right and the left experienced traffic problems during much of 2006.

While this is not conclusive evidence of the political blogosphere reaching an audience plateau over the past year, it does strongly suggest a plateau has occurred. Current estimates of a daily audience of 4-5 million for progressive political blogs, and an occasional audience of up to 13-14 million for all political blogs, are now appearing in multiple sources. While this gives the progressive blogosphere a substantial, at least 2-1 edge in both daily and occasional traffic on the conservative blogosphere, since our traffic is now stagnant I am not ready to toot our horn when pointing that out. Just as I once proclaimed that the aristocratic right-wing blogosphere was stagnating, it now seems that the community oriented left-wing blogosphere is stagnating as well.

Despite these numbers, I believe it would be a mistake to argue that "the death of political blogging" is imminent (I put that phrase in scare quotes because I can't even begin to count the number of times I have been asked about what will result in the death of political blogging). Instead, I believe this means is that the world of online political content generation is moving away from the top-down model of an individual, independent blogger producing the majority of new content for a given website--a model which was dominant through most of 2002-2005. Now, the paradigm is shifting toward a more networked, community-oriented model where a much higher percentage of the audience participates in the generation of new content. Blogging, including political blogging, is still quite healthy, as long as it encourages user-generated content and relies on a group of main writers rather than a single individual. However, the days when an individual blogger can start a new, solo website and make a big national splash are probably over. The blogosphere and the netroots are transforming, not dying off.

Take, for example, Dailykos. According to resident statistician jotter, while overall site traffic on Dailykos slightly declined in 2006 compared to 2005, user participation in the generation of new content on the site actually increased by 20%. This shifted the overall reader to content generator ratio within the Dailykos audience from about 25-1 in 2005, to just 15-1 in 2006. That is a substantial shift for only one year, and demonstrative of larger trends. Looking at the websites ranked in the top fifteen in terms of page views the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, only two and a half, Political Animal, Eschaton and the Talking Points Memo side of the TPM netowrk, are still primarily single-blogger operations (those also happen to be some of the oldest political blogs around). Further, while political blogosphere traffic has remained generally flat over seventeen months now (apart from election-related spikes), social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have continued to expand at the same exponential rates that the political blogosphere once expanded (although MySpace is starting to flatten out as well). It is entirely possible, if not likely, that the growth social networking sites continue to experience while even community oriented progressive blogs remain flat was mirrored in 2003-2005 when group and community-oriented progressive blogs rocketed past top-down, individual-based, no comments allowed, right-wing blogs in terms of traffic. Even though it is benefiting a small number of large websites, the ability websites such as YouTube or Facebook give their audience to produce their own content has allowed those websites to perpetuate their viral stage of growth and development much longer than websites which offer fewer avenues for community-generated content and networking.

In addition to the end of the era of the highly successful solo-blogger, I forecast that this development toward user-generated content will carry two other important ramifications for the political blogosphere. First, the already extreme gap between the political engagement of netroots activists and rank-and-file voters will grow even wider. With more people not just consuming political information online, but helping to generate it, netroots activists will continue to consolidate as a sort of "elite influential" subset within the American political system. Second, in order to remain successful, more than more political blogs will transform into full-blown professional operations that can be considered institutions unto themselves. In addition to community development, they will more frequently produce difficult, original work (beat reporting, investigative journalism, professional lobbying, national activist campaigns, original video, commissioned polls, mass email lists, etc.) that until now have been mainly the province of long-established news and political organizations. Competition from other high-end blogs will continue to raise the bar in this area, as the days of thriving on punditry alone are further confined to diaries and comments off the front-page.

Phew. This is not going to be easy, and it may all collapse if blogger can't find better revenue streams. After all, you can't run a professional organization and upgrade your user generated content options without money to pay programmers and full-time employees. Many wags compared the collapse of Howard Dean's Presidential campaign in 2004 to the dot.com bust of 2000, but the real bust could happen in a more traditional economic sense two or three down the road. I know hat I won't stop trying to find ways to keep the progressive political blogosphere moving forward, but I can't deny the difficulties that lay ahead."

Thanks to all those who come here and read my articles and have posted here as well. Please join me at my new site, www.conservativetimes.org to my articles, posts and other musing along with those many other talented writers and people with something interesting to say.

Good Bye and Farwell!