Top 10 Virginia Political Blogs in Terms of Traffic: May 2011

Starting now, this will be a monthly feature on Blue Virginia, providing the most accurate traffic statistics rankings possible for the Virginia political blogosphere (not counting corporate media or politicians’ blogs). Based on Sitemeter statistics, for those Virginia blogs which show them publicly (at least a couple have Sitemeters, but oddly don’t show the results publicly), the top Virginia political blogs in May (in terms of traffic to their sites) were:

1. Blue Virginia: 47,587 visits (NOTE: Blue Virginia also has 740 Twitter followers, plus I have 1,333 Twitter followers and 809 Facebook friends)

2. Not Larry Sabato: 45,782 visits (NOTE: NLS also has 3,504 Twitter followers and 1,058 Facebook friends)

3. Bearing Drift: 34,066 visits (NOTE: JR Hoeft has 520 Twitter followers and Brian Kirwin has 253 Twitter followers)

4. Moonhowlings: 22,619 visits

5. BVBL: 18,464 visits (NOTE: Greg Letieq has 50 Twitter followers)

6. NOVA Townhall: 12,225 visits

7. NOVA Commonsense: 7,621 visits (NOTE: Brian Schoeneman has 380 Twitter followers)

8. The Green Miles: 3,988 visits (NOTE: Miles also has 2,866 Twitter followers and 1,472 Facebook friends)

9. The Richmonder: 2,703 visits (NOTE: The Richmonder has 50 Facebook fans and JC Wilmore has 305 Facebook friends)

10. Red NOVA: 1,567 visits

Now, if we could just get Sitemeter stats for a few others, particularly Too Conservative (my guess is that they’d be in the BVBL/Moonhowlings range, maybe a bit higher) and Vivian Paige (based on the # of blog posts and local focus, I’d guess the middle of the pack somewhere, but hard to say), we’d have a pretty comprehensive idea of the major political blogs (not counting corporate media or politicians’ blogs) in Virginia.

P.S. As we’ve discussed, Technorati and Alexa are almost completely unreliable proxies for “traffic.” They also have other serious problems which make them essentially unusable for the purpose of tracking blog traffic. What I’d urge is for every Virginia political to get Sitemeter or Google Analytics and display the stats publicly. Then, we can all compare “apples to apples” and get as accurate a read of the most “popular” Virginia political blogs as possible.

P.P.S. Waldo Jaquith hasn’t been blogging much for the past couple years, but his blog used to be (back in 2005, for instance) the leading progressive blog in Virginia in terms of influence, by almost all accounts. However, Waldo never displayed a public Sitemeter, so I have no idea how much traffic he received.