Arianna Huffington got quite a shout out from the New York Times yesterday as Citizen Huff. Apparently the Huffington Post’s unique visitors on Nielsen has risen to 3.7 million, placing this home for the liberal devout number two on Technorati behind Tech Crunch–an impressive total after only three years and a benchmark in Arianna’s goal of being an online newspaper.
Pajamas Media got started about a half year after the Huffington Post with a “distributed model.” We amalgamated about ninety independent blogs more loosely around a main portal site. This was chosen deliberately as a more “democratic and bloggy” approach, although we think we are building a newspaper in our way too.
Pajamas Media’s total unique visitors in its network for March (also based on Nielsen stats) were four million – three hundred thousand more than the Huffington Post – although this doesn’t appear on Technorati because we have many different URLs, a result of our original choice.
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11 Comments
1. Roger von Oech:That’s impressive. I thought it would be only one-tenth of that.
As they say, “Who knew?”
Apr 1, 2008 - 8:23 am 2. Anthony (Los Angeles):And the quality and breadth of views featured at PJM leaves HuffPo in the dust.
Apr 1, 2008 - 9:51 am 3. W.J.A:The comparison is kinda dubious. The Federated Media blog network has a similar model to Pajamas Media and includes Boing Boing, Mashable, and a lot of other Technorati Top 100 blogs, but it’d be an apples/oranges deal to say Federated Media has more readers than HuffPo.
Apr 1, 2008 - 10:15 am 4. Roger:“The comparison is kinda dubious.”
You have a point, W. J. A., although I note you include the qualifier “kinda.” PJM began with many (largely like minded) political blogs coming together. This is evolving, of course, and may soon include many other things. We’re all flying by the seat of our pants here. But PJM did not begin precisely with the intentions of Fed Media. Perhaps you could say our approach was a hybrid of Huff Po and Fed.
Apr 1, 2008 - 10:22 am 5. In Vino Veritas:Isn’t the comparison further dubious in that the unique visitors to Pajamas Media could (and probably are ) multiple-counted. If I visit two blogs on the pajama media network in the same month, do I get counted as a “unique” visitor twice?
Apr 1, 2008 - 11:10 am 6. SomeNYGuy:Roger said,
“We’re all flying by the seat of our pants here.”
That’s not all you’re doing by the seat of your pants.
Apr 1, 2008 - 11:52 am 7. Godzilla:Roger, there’s a part of your post that I wasn’t clear about. In order for PM to get a hit, does one have to log onto the PM site, or will logging on to one of PM’s affiliated bloggers be sufficient for PM to get credit for a visit?
Apr 1, 2008 - 11:53 am 8. Godzilla:Hmmm…since Instapundit received between 7 and 8 million hits last month alone, the obvious answer is no, logging onto instapundit directly does not increase PM hit counter.
BTW, however, whether by luck or strategic planning, you’ve got a real handshake logic thing going on, with all the bloggers in PM’s blogroll sporting the PM logo.
In fact, I think you should be advertising those bloggers with something more visual than a little button labeled “PJM Blogroll”. Whoever recommended that made a bad call, imo. It is a paradigm now that people expect to see a blogroll in the margins of the webpage, they do not expect to have to link to a page to get to the links. Inreasing the exposure to your blogroll by returning it to the way you had it should help to increase the exposure to PM. How much effect this has is debatable, but I’d argue that PM will get increased exposure. (I.E. person goes to PM, sees a blog on the blogroll, links to it, likes it, tell his network of friends about the site, and PM gets secondary exposure.)
Apr 1, 2008 - 12:21 pm 9. Lem:The Times may not have meant it this way.
Apr 1, 2008 - 12:33 pm 10. CTRepublican:Calling her Citizen Huff, was not necessarily a compliment
Roger, you’re essentially counting blogroll traffic — “many different URLs” as your own. That’s not even remotely how HuffPo gets its traffic, which is almost entirely the result of its own content.
It’s not even apples and oranges; it’s a watermelon and a Clementine.
Apr 1, 2008 - 1:09 pm 11. Godzilla:CTRepublican, if a person goes to the PJM site, I think it’s a pretty safe bet to think that they did so because of wanting to see what headlines are currently on the PJM site, not because they wanted to transfer specifically to one of the blogrolled sites. I don’t read the Huffington Post, but if all of its articles are on the Huffington Post site, then PJM has a better business model, in my view, and scales better. PJM effectively has, when you add in the dozen or so affilates, over 100 articles to choose from when deciding what to headline. The fact that one has to “leave” PJM to read the article is a backroom issue that should not discount the hits that PJM gets.
Apr 1, 2008 - 3:22 pm