David Kaplan of PaidContent.org compared the number of unique visitors in April in political blog sites such as Huffington Post and The Drudge Report and found that “left-leaning” sites had 6.4 million; “right-leaning,” 4.8 million; and “neutral/non-partisan,” 1.3 million.
This is a fun comparison, but here are a few web-analytics-nerd thoughts for newsrooms who are competing for these audiences.
- The left didn’t necessarily “win.” To really gauge the relative strength or engagement of the audiences, you should look at ratios like number of visits per UV, number of page views per visit, and bounce rate.
- The left’s 6.4 million UVs is dominated by HuffPo’s 5.6 million. The right’s 4.8 million was more distributed among The Drudge Report, Free Republic, World Net Daily and others. I’d like to know how many UVs the sites shared – and how many went to only left sites, only right sites, and only neutral or nonpartisan sites.
- Also, how many went to both left and right, or to all three? How many who categorized themselves as left-leaning went to right sites? Right-leaning to left, and so on? (Note: A lot of this data will send you into analysis paralysis, but there could be some actionable info here.)
- In the minds of your audiences, is your site categorized as conservative/right, liberal/left or neutral/nonpartisan? Ideally, you should measure the differences in perception between news stories and editorials.
- Are your pages coded and/or is your site set up to track all “political” content, whether it’s on the home page or the officially named “Politics” section?
News Numbers 