The real Orange County political blog rankings

Numbers don’t matter all that much, but it is somewhat interesting to see how the many different political blogs in Orange County compare to each other with regard to overall readership.  Sadly, the only ranking service for political blogs, BNN, is now suspect, since they ranked the Liberal OC #11 in a week when their blog was down for technical reasons.

This week BNN ranked the Liberal OC #3, tied with us, but our Sitemeter statistics tell the real story.  We have, as of today, 5,616 visits and 17,031 page views this week.  The Liberal OC has had only 2,825 visits and 6,334 page views.  How exactly are they tied with us?  They aren’t in the same zip code at this point!

So how can we rank the local political blogs?  There is a service called Alexa.com that ranks not just blogs but ALL websites, according to their traffic.  Their rankings thus are worldwide, global website rankings.  Let’s take a look at how Alexa.com is currently ranking the local Orange County political blogs, over the past week:

1. The Orange Juice blog: ranked 179,488

2. Red County (a statwide blog that is based in Orange County): 275,261

3. Bolsavik blog: 353,934

4. The Liberal OC blog: 462,905

5. Flash Report (a statewide blog that is based in Orange County): 541,492

6. John Seiler’s Blog: 637,519

I did not include the Orange County Register’s political blogs, Total Buzz and Orange Punch as all of the Register’s blogs are ranked together, so it is not a fair comparison to the blogs listed above.  I did look up a slew of smaller political blogs but none of them were remotely close to the numbers listed above.

If I missed a significant Orange County political blog, please let me know so I can add it to the list.

The lesson to take away from this information is particularly pertinent to advertisers.  Those who are paying a fortune to advertise on Red County and the Flash Report in particular should question their investment.  For the Flash Report to have even less traffic than the Liberal OC is simply embarrassing!  Even John Seiler’s blog, which is great but not widely read, is very close to the Flash Report’s overall traffic ranking.

As for our ranking, this is actually the third week that we have beat Red County.  It is odd that our readership is growing during the political off-season.  I think that our coverage of the disasters that are the City of Santa Ana and the Santa Ana Unified School District has helped give us a dedicated base of readership.  And our mix of bipartisan bloggers provides a compelling variety of political views that you just won’t find on any of the other blogs listed above.

The L.A. Times recently published an article that claimed that blog readers want partisan blogs.  I think they are wrong.  Readers want the unvarnished truth.  They want to be challenged.  They don’t want to be spoon fed spin that has been sanitized by either the red or blue party hacks.  When you consider that about a third of voters in California are now DTS, or decline to state, you can see the obvious.  People who read blogs are smart and educated, for the most part.  They can get their news anywhere – when they read blogs they are looking for something more.  And the numbers prove it.

I thank our readers and our bloggers for making the Orange Juice the #1 political blog in Orange County.  We couldn’t do it without you!


About Admin

"Admin" is just editors Vern Nelson, Greg Diamond, or Ryan Cantor sharing something that they mostly didn't write themselves, but think you should see. Before December 2010, "Admin" may have been former blog owner Art Pedroza.