Paul Gottfried

An obvious Omission

Posted by Paul Gottfried on August 25, 2007

An Obvious Omission

In his latest column for Tribune Media Services, Jonah Goldberg deals with the question of why in recent years “conservative” websites have not fared as well as “liberal” ones. Apparently back in the salad days of the Clinton administration, everyone who counted was reading or writing for “conservative” websites. But then everything changed dramatically: “liberalism is having a nice moment—largely because the Republican president and the Iraqi war are unpopular.” Moreover, the “energy is on liberalism’s side—and that translates into success in the digital world. Conservative media and Free Republic-style activists prospered in the Clinton 1990s because that’s when we were on offense. And it’s always more exciting—and easier—to be on offense. In the Bush years it’s the other way around.”
Unless Jonah is invincibly stupid, which I don’t think he is, surely he and his friends must know that never in American history have rightwing bloggers attracted more readers than they are at this moment. But the websites that are showing the biggest growth are not the neocon-controlled ones, which distil the same party line day-in and day-out. The websites on the right that are drawing in rapidly increasing numbers of visitors are the ones managed and staffed by paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians. Indeed it would be fair to say that our side would be lying in History’s dustbin were it not for this website and other ones to which we link. It behooves Goldberg to acknowledge this fact, even though he may wish that it were not true. At the very least he should know that we know that he is not divulging everything when he reports that “conservative” websites are losing out to “liberal” ones.
According to quantcast.com data about the relative traffic on different websites, Antiwar.com, a paleolibertarian enterprise, is outdrawing Goldberg’s NRO on the order of about 2.5 to 1 each month. Right now Antiwar.com is pulling in a monthly global total of almost 500,000 readers. According to the Google Analytics data that his foundation uses, Lew Rockwell has been recently approaching similar numbers as compared to the monthly figure of 208,000 which I have located on quantcast.com for Goldberg’s website. Vdare.com, on the basis of the same source, gets over 52,000 hits monthly, which is at least five times its number five years ago. And this newly started website for which I am writing is, according to quantcast.com, edging its way up to 13,000. Unlike the money-engorged and grotesquely wasteful NRO, all paleo websites operate on a shoe string. Rockwell’s well frequented website not only does not pay for contributions but asks for donations from contributors. (I give to Lew gladly, although I don’t always agree with the views expressed on his website, because we need the kind of diversity on the right that he and others are now providing.) The fact that our side has done so brilliantly with so little may tell more about the caliber of our opposition than it does about our merits.
A final relevant observation comes from Scott Richert, who assists with the Chronicles website. Scott tells me that it is highly doubtful that Jonah and his buds are losing numbers. In the last ten years most political websites have increased their traffic because of improved access to readers and because more and more people go online for information and commentary. What Jonah meant to say is that Moveon.org, Daily Kos, and other leading leftist websites have surged in the blogosphere while NRO has grown less dramatically. What Jonah would slit his throat before admitting is that what he calls the “lunatic” Right, e.g., Taft Republicans, have also shared in this surge.


Comments

traffic rank for vdare 80,791

Traffic Rank for takimag 255,886

Traffic Rank for lewrockwell 14,422

Traffic Rank for antiwar 18,998

Traffic Rank for dailykos 4,652

Traffic Rank for politico 11,217

Traffic Rank for democraticunderground 10,975

Traffic Rank for aei 118,046

Traffic Rank for jinsa 1,147,941

Traffic Rank for newamericancentury 426,520

Traffic Rank for forward 135,147

Traffic Rank for muzzlewatch 1,731,969

Traffic Rank for vdare 80,791

I’ve no idea where Mr. Burke found these figures. They
certainly do not correspond to the figues that I’ve
seen.

Encouraging news, Mr. Gottfried, and I’m not easily encouraged.  This may explain why Ron Paul has done so well in on-line polls and other measures of cyber-strength.

Dr Gottfried, the figures i posted were from the website i will post below, it is a ranking of sites compared to other sites, not the total number of visits to that site.

the lower the rank the higher the number of visits to that site.

http://www.alexa.com/search?q=www.takimag.com&x=30&y=7

Good to hear who’s reading what.

Is Anti-War.com just Paleolibertarian and Paleoconservative?  That would be news to Cindy Sheehan and Gore Vidal.  Is Lew Rockwell.com “right”?  That would be news to the Austrian School, and Hayak went out of his way to say so.  It is wrong to think that there is only “left”, “right” and the in between “moderate”. Political viewpoints resemble more a canvas from Jackson Pollock. Paul Gottfried was wise to commend Brian Mitchell’s must-read book.

Since posting my column, I have received lists
of variant figures for the websites cited, taken
from different data collectors.`But none of these
figures contradicts my generalizations about the
surging interest in paleo websites or about the
in all probability deliberate omission of this fact
from
Goldberg’s account. With dues respect to Blue Flower,
ideological distinctions can and should be drawn here.
Jonah would not be ignoring us if he and his masters
did not consider us unacceptably rightwing. That
counts for more than who fits where in Brian
Mitchell’s picture of the political landscape, a point
that I explicitly made in reviewing that fine book.

Alexa.com is not a reliable source of traffic rankings, because it relies on voluntary participation by users, who have to download and install the Alexa toolbar.  The toolbar used to be available only for Windows users who use Internet Explorer; today, a Firefox version is available, too, but again only for Windows users.  Thus, Mac users and Linux users are excluded from the rankings, as well as Windows users who don’t use IE or FF (or simply don’t want to, or don’t have the technological savvy to, install a third-party browser extension).

From our own experience at Chronicles, I’d say that Nielsen NetRatings is (other than a server-side analytics program) the most reliable source of data (which isn’t surprising, considering the years of experience that Nielsen has).  Unfortunately, you have to subscribe to their service to get the numbers (or contract with someone who does, such as a clipping service).

Our experience has been very similar to that outlined by Paul.  Since starting ChroniclesMagazine.org, we’ve occasionally seen traffic fall month over month, but never for two months in a row. And overall, growth has been very strong, even after we switched our site over to a new format a few months back, losing thousands of inbound links in the process.

thanks for sharing about alexas defficiency in rating accuracy…

My take on the political horizon from where i see it is this, aipac controls the issues...the neocons control the agenda guided by their ideology which is an offshoot of aipac...the media newspapers… follow suit...so what are we, the dissenters of this overthrow in government left with? we are left fragmented and succeptible to being diffused and denutered of any numerical power that antiwar may possess...we are not organized ...we do not conduct concerted email campaings or phone calling barrages to the elected officials who are by now trained and submissive by their desire to stay in power and their lack of moral ethics to take a moral stand on any issue that runs at crosscurrents to these neo trotsky neocons who are in effect changing our constitutional form of government, so we are pressured by this soft communism to use the term in homoamericanus to conform or be ostracized...hate speech is another tool at their disposal so are hate crime laws....a crime is a crime is a crime .

All conservatives who were caught carrying water for
Shrub are paying the price for their unthinking
support, but those conservatives who stuck to their
guns are doing OK

Moral, do not sell your soul. It does not pay in the
end.

Of course, I expect to see some interesting cross-
pollination between liberal and conservative oppositions
to the way, and some surprising realignments.

Mrs Adriana:

I dwell far off in the Blue. I know little of the news.  I know even less of America.  May I ask you, who is Shrub?

Shrub is the not-so-affectionate nickname given to
our President, shrub, means literally, a small bush,
with the big bush being the father.

It is just a pun for those of us who do not like him.

Scott is absolutely right about the perils of using Alexa to measure relative web-traffic. Two other points.

1. It skews toward sites popular with techies, which is not surprising as they are most likely to download things like toolbars.

2. It is biased against sites that are read during the day by people who work for large corporations. Most corporations tightly control the kind of software that employees can download, and Alexa’s toolbar is not usually permitted download.

Statistics from http://www.quantcast.com

NEOCON SITES

Free Republic
878,000 U.S. monthly uniques

National Review
208,000 U.S. monthly uniques

Weekly Standard
134,000 U.S. monthly uniques

PALEOCONSERVATIVE SITES

Stormfront
56,606 U.S. monthly uniques

VDare
52,431 U.S. monthly uniques

American Conservative
34,304 U.S. monthly uniques

American Renaissance
25,884 U.S. monthly uniques

Taki Mag
12,758 U.S. monthly uniques

Chronicles Magazine
4,340 U.S. monthly uniques

Conservative Heritage Times
2,038 U.S. monthly uniques

Conservative Exodus Project
2000 U.S. monthly uniques

Middle American News
2000 U.S. monthly uniques

Occidental Quarterly
2000 U.S. monthly uniques

Middle American News
2000 U.S. monthly uniques

National Policy Institute
2000 U.S. monthly uniques

Posted by John on Aug 28, 2007.

Click to flag this comment as abusive

Hello Everyone

I need some help to sort out my marriage.

Spoken to a lot of bored friends but does anyone know of any advice available online?

Just wanna read up and not involve anyone else.  Been told about ebook below - anyone read it?

Thanks.

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This is it here save your marriage

Я встречаюсь со своей девушкой два года. Она меня полностью устраивает и я ее тоже, но сколько девушек мне пришлось вычеркнуть из своей жизни прежде чем встретить ее. Я расскажу свой опыт знакомства с молодыми девушками. В пятнадцать лет мне захотелось познакомиться с какой-нибудь красивой девушкой моих лет, но ни кто не обращал на меня внимание.
Им нужен был кто-то постарше и с деньгами. Затем я начал думать, чем можно взять их. Пробовал подходить и просто говорить, но не поставленная речь всё портила. Они смеялись или делали умный вид, а потом уходили. Это задевало по моему самолюбию. Вскоре я понял, что можно подкатывать с розой, но максимум что я получал это разрешение проводить их до дома. У порога ее квартиры я получал слова “Спасибо за розочку” и дверь закрывалась. И на мой взгляд у меня остался третий вариант – просто не обращать на них внимание (подался в монахи). Вскоре это принесло плоды, но не те которые я хотел. Это были пустые девушки (с ними было интересно разговаривать). Тогда я не понял, что красота играет не значительную роль. Вскоре мне приглянулась девушка на год старше меня. Она была симпатичная и умная. Я стал искать способ познакомиться с ней и нашел его. В ее классе учился мой друг.  Он стал звать ее гулять, но я играл роль “третий лишний”. Проблема была в том, что я ей не нравился. Я не отчаялся и стал более на
стойчивым, внимательным и чутким. Она оценила это, и через три месяца я стал ее парнем, а еще через месяц она призналась мне в любви! Мы уже два года вместе и я понял что она моя вторая половинка, без которой я не представляю жизни.  Сейчас у меня много друзей девушек и так даже лучше когда ты их друг, но порой это выходит за рамки. Они начинают намекать тебе, что они тоже есть. На мой взгляд самый лучший вариант это просто дружить с девушкой, а потом вы поймете чего вы стоите.
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