The Power of Kos

Dean Barnett writes about The Daily Kos at The Weekly Standard:

TEN MONTHS AGO Kos's ascendancy seemed hardly pre-ordained. On April 1, 2004, Kos responded to the savage murder of four American contractors in Falluja by writing, "I feel nothing over the death of the mercenaries [sic]. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them."

At the time of this outburst, Kos was using his blog as a platform to create advertising revenue and to establish credibility for a political consulting business. His outburst threatened to destroy the budding project.

Immediately Kos' foils in the conservative blogosphere demanded that the politicians who advertised on Daily Kos remove their ads and disassociate themselves from both the site and its proprietor. One of the first to heed this call was Texas Democrat Martin Frost. His campaign noted its departure from Kos's site by saying, "There is no place for these disgusting remarks in this nation's discussion on foreign policy." Other campaigns followed the Frost campaign's lead and it seemed like Kos might have been in trouble.

But then something funny happened. While politicians distanced themselves from the site, Kos's fans stayed put. A quick glance at Kos's traffic figures for April of 2004 shows no drop-off in the wake of Moulitsas' controversial comments. And since the eyeballs remained, politicians soon returned. Political advertisers who had left were replaced in short order by other office seekers. At first it seemed the entire affair might ruin Kos; in the end it was, as he put it in an interview with the New York Times, nothing more than a "blip."

Actually, that's almost right. In fact, the "screw them" event is what actually propelled Kos to the top of the blogosphere (though he was close before that) and therein lies the fundamental problem with Kos' "success" - the lower he goes, the more readers he attracts. And how does this large number of "page views" translate into "clout"? Invariably those pols who Kos supports fail - from Dean in the primaries to Kerry in the general election. In fact, of 15 candidates Kos 'supported' (if the price was right) in the last election, all 15 lost.

More Kos facts: Kos was one of the blogs touting the faulty "exit polls" during the last election. The end result was a great opportunity for mainstream media to bash blogs for not fact checking, being quick to publish questionable material as facts, etc. etc. - a big hit to the credibility of blogs in general.

The bottom line is that Kos' readers (and you can pick a random post and read their comments to get familiar with them) are really not the movers and shakers of this world. I believe Hugh Hewitt has made this point repeatedly, if not specifically about Kos, that your "influence" as a blogger is measured by who your readers are, not how many readers you have.

And I'd note that as far as numbers, that "page view" statistic is misleading. Kos readership is made up of a core of around 5-6 thousand readers* (and I'm probably being generous here) who visit his site 20-40 times a day. Why? They're checking in repeatedly to see the evolving comment threads - this is the big attraction at the Daily Kos. A "community" has been built there over time, one I'd speculate replaces actual face-to-face human contact for a lot of his readers.

That Barbara Boxer finds the number of page views at Daily Kos attractive speaks a lot for the in-depth research ability of Democratic powers that be. Those numbers do not translate into political success, in fact the evidence mounts that the opposite is true.

Last, note that I'm in favor of what's good for blogs, and I will repeat here my support of the two-party system - with a re-invigorated and robust Democratic Party as one of the two, but Kos is increasingly poison for both.

Notes:

*In support of this number I offer a recent e-mail exchange I had with a fellow milblogger. He mentioned that a couple recent links to his site from Kos had resulted in about 500 visitors to his blog. This guy wasn't complaining, he was just surprised at the low number. I offered two possible explanations in response, neither of which speak well for the Kos crowd. One, the actual numbers are low, as stated above, and two, most of Kos' readers are quite willing to take whatever he says as gospel and don't actually follow the links he provides. I've seen this phenomenon with a few left-wing blogs that link here from time to time. The comment thread at the linking site has more comments from more people than numbers of visits I got from that link. All of them are quick to agree with whatever the linker said though - and that's troubling. That said, by all means don't take my word for it, go visit The Daily Kos and see for yourself exactly what I'm talking about when I do a post like this.

Finally, a word on outbound links in general, A better measure of the "influence" of a blog might be the number of people that a site can send elsewhere in the internet. A link from Glenn Reynolds sends thousands, but nothing near the 100,000+ visits he gets a day. Links from LGF rival that number, as do those from Hugh Hewitt, The Corner, James Lileks, and a few other blogs. But a bit further down the scale in "hit counts" you'll find Mudville, with a significantly lower (by more than an order of magnitude from Instapundit) number of daily visits. Still a stand-alone link from here (as opposed to a link in a post like this), even without a boost from additional inbound links to the post in question, can send over one thousand visitors to the linked site. In fact, many blogs can send 1000-plus. These numbers, while harder to track than site visits, probably would graph a bit more linearly than the "page view" numbers (with a steep curve at the top and a long tail) generally accepted as a measure of success of blogs today.