Re: The man behind RedState.com shakes up the Republican Party – St. Petersburg Times, by Adam C. Smith, Times Political Editor, In Print: Monday, January 4, 2010
Red State bloggers
…Erickson, editor in chief of the RedState.com blog, is emerging as one of the most important and prescient new voices and opinion-shapers in the Republican Party. And he is an increasingly influential headache for party leaders seen as straying from conservative principles.
The St. Petersburg Times has published an article swooning over the success and influence of a guy named Erick Erickson, founder of the blog, RedState.com. Redstate is not the largest whack job blog, but it may be the most influential one.
Republicans for years have lamented how Democrats have been more effective at organizing and raising money online, and RedState was created in 2004 as an answer to the popular liberal site Daily Kos. In 2006 it was bought by Eagle Publishing, which also owns Human Events and Regnery Publishing, whose authors include Newt Gingrich, Laura Ingraham and Bernard Goldberg.
Erickson is the only paid employee at RedState, which features about two dozen volunteer contributors. With roughly 300,000 unique visitors monthly, RedState has lighter traffic than such conservative sites as biggovernment.com, townhall.com and hotair.com, but it tends to have a greater knack for driving the discussion among conservatives around Capitol Hill and activists across the country.
RedState.com gets an average 53,227 unique visitors per day. A unique visitor is a method of tracking human (as opposed to bots and webcrawlers) visitors to a sight within a specified time. For comparison among whack job blog sites, according to websitemark.net, biggovernment.com pulls 103,104 unique visitors per day. Townhall.com gathers in 81,877 per day. Hotair.com gets a whopping 122,187 unique visitors per day.
According to another website tracker, Websiteshadow.com, DailyKos.com’s unique visitor count is a off the charts with 514,437 daily hits and has a market value of over $513,000. Redstate.com comes in at only 99,342 unique visitors and has a market value of just over $191,000.
Just for kicks and giggles, let’s compare news outlets online, not counting newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and NY Times, we’ll keep it with just strictly internet news. Probably the most influential and most read conservative news outlet is foxnews.com (a codicil here, I’ve including foxnews.com because even though they have a huge news network, they do not produce a daily paper). Again, using websiteshadow.com as a source, Foxnews.com generates 1,794,100 daily unique visitors. The foxnews.com website only has a market value of $51,670,080. The second largest, purely conservative site is drudgereport.com and has 1,339,800 unique visitors per day and a market value of $38,586,240.
Purely liberal online news outlets are few, so it looks like liberals flock to just one. Without question the most read liberal news outlet (although they claim that they are neutral) is Huffingtonpost.com. They pull in 2,182,950 unique visitors per day and have a market value of $62,868,960. As with the NYTimes.com which many right wingers consider a liberal news outlet*, I can’t count thenation.com because they produce a weekly journal and have been since the 1860’s. The next closest thing to a purely liberal news outlet after Huffington Post would have to be slate.com with a daily visitor count of 662,200, and and worth of $19,071,360, after that maybe talkingpointsmemo.com with a daily unique hit count of 117,040. To compare the drudgereport.com which began as a compliment to a radio show to something on the left isn’t easy. The closest thing I can conjure is the fledgling website airamerica.com with a daily unique visitor count of only 20,790.
If you combine the right wing sites together they dominate the internet even though the left has used the internet to revolutionize how politics is played.
*One thing to keep in mind when comparing news outlets, and there are a plethora of them, is this: what conservatives consider to be liberal is not the same thing as what the liberals consider to be liberal. That is why you hear them complain so much about the “liberal media”. To right wingers, anything that is not the frothing-at-the-mouth, tea-bag fringe fanaticism is considered “liberal”. They think that CNN is “liberal media” when it is actually quite centrist with right-leaning tendencies as evidenced by their insistence on propelling right wing talking points.
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Limbaugh Disses Haiti, Accuses Obama of Using Info for Campaign
Re: Limbaugh: ‘We’ve Already Donated To Haiti, It’s Called US Income Tax’ (VIDEO), Huffington Post | Nicholas Graham First Posted: 01-14-10 08:14 AM | Updated: 01-14-10 09:04 AM
Rush Limbaugh is showing the entire nation the stuff he’s made of. He is once again defining himself. This time he is calling for citizens of the US to stop donating to the ravaged country of Haiti. Limbaugh claims that your donations through the official White House website will somehow wind up in the hands of the President to be used for some imaginary nefarious deeds. He says that Obama will use this charity to “burnish his credibility in both light-skinned and black-skinned African-American communities”.
Audio:
http://videos.mediaite.com/embed/player/?content=2D6YL91RJ1ZQJH0X&widget_type_cid=svp
http://videos.mediaite.com/embed/player/?content=5XW3R409T8R7Y6C4&widget_type_cid=svp
Aren’t African-American communities the same as plain ole American communities? In my town, black people live next door to white people. We are just neighbors, just a community.
I think that Limbaugh has gone too far this time. I think the accusations that Obama will use the money collected at WhiteHouse.gov in other ways than advertised should be investigated as slander.
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