Blogging Is My Business, and Business Is Slow

National Journal's GovExec has the traffic numbers for political blogs. They ain't good.

RedState traffic is down 28 percent but page views are up 12
percent over the past three months. RedState underwent a redesign and
management overhaul this summer. Right Wing News dropped 20 percent
over the same time, Blogs for Bush was down 13 percent, and Townhall,
which also was recently redesigned after an acquisition, dropped 14
percent.

By contrast to the big drops for RedState and Right Wing News,
readership at the liberal Huffington Post is down 14 percent, and the
drop is 12 percent at Daily Kos, the most trafficked blog… As for the Republican National Committee versus the Democratic National
Committee, both saw traffic declines. The DNC was down 24 percent, and
the RNC dropped twice as much at 48 percent.

Considering the rate at which the RNC churns out web videos, that's pretty surprising. The original liberal blog MyDD is actually up, as is the liberal Virginia blog Raising Kaine. That's important—the big shot political bloggers have speculated for a while that local blogs were the wave of the future. The bloggers who finally establish liberal and conservative sites in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada are going to find themselves incredibly popular come late 2007.

This is as good a time as any to plug two Reason stories—my review of the big two bloggers' books, and Matt Welch's farewell to warblogging.

(Cross-posted at AS.com.)