Why won’t Red County post their readership data?

Matt/Jubal Cunningham likes to brag that his blog, Red County, is #1.  Yet he steadfastly refuses to post his readership data.  Most Orange County political blogs, including the Orange Juice and the Liberal OC, do post their readership data, via a link to Sitemeter.  The Orange Juice goes one step beyond that as we post the expanded Sitemeter data – ata cost of hundreds of dollars each year.

Cunningham has been challenging me to post our Google Analytics data.  Fine.  Shown above is our Google Analytics visitor’s data for the months of June and July, 2008.  We converted our blog from our old software to WordPress in May and by June our numbers had skyrocketed.  Each month since our conversion we have bested the previous month.  I am sure August will be fantastic too.

Our page views have also blown up since our conversion to WordPress.  (See the graphic above).

So there you go Matt.  Now YOU need to post YOUR readership data.  Otherwise I shall have no choice but to assume that Alexa.com’s rankings are correct.  According to Alexa.com, we have been trouncing Red County’s numbers since June 1.

Thank you to our webmaster, Sarah Spinosa, for helping to make us the number one political blog in Orange County – and thanks to all our co-bloggers and to our readers.  We wouldn’t be number one without you!

UPDATE:

Matt/Jubal Cunnigham is making the crazed argument that folks are finding our blog because they are looking for blogs about Orange Juice, the beverage.  So let’s have a look at what the data has to say about this:

Readers spend more than five minutes reading our blog when they visit.  That is about double the national average, according to Google Analytics.

And check this out…68% of our readers are Returning Visitors.  Only 31% are new Visitors.

How about folks who use search engines to find us?  Over 1,700 in the past month have searched for the phrase “Orange Juice Blog.”  Another 900 have searched for similar permutations of that phrase.  Only 396 have searched for “Orange Juice.”

The graphic above indicates that just over a third of our traffic comes from search engines.  The rest comes from referral sites and direct traffic.

So why has our readership blown up since our redesign?  Matt’s theory is obviously crazy.  But I think we CAN identify a few reasons why our readership has doubled, including:

  • Sarah Spinosa set up our blog so that we could use a variety of tags that make it easier to find our stories on search engines, particularly Google.com.
  • Our blog team is prolific – and over 90% of our posts are NOT press releases!  We do often refer to newspaper stories but we also add our two cents to the resulting posts.
  • Our blog team is the most diverse blog team in Orange County, bar none.  Thus our posts are relevant to all sorts of readers, not just to Democrats or Republicans.
  • Our bloggers don’t pander to the local political parties.  Readers know they can read the Orange Juice without being spoon fed warmed up spin.
  • Our newest bloggers each brought hundreds of readers to our blog.  And some of our veteran bloggers, especially Larry Gilbert, email their articles to hundreds of folks in their email lists.
  • And from time to time we end up helping to create real change in the community.  Ask Santa Ana Clowncilman Carlos Bustamante how he feels about the role we played in getting him booted off two state commissions…

If Matt wants folks to believe that Red County is still the #1 political blog in Orange County then he needs to make his readership data available to the public.  I suspect he can’t do that because his advertisers will find out he has been ripping them off…


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"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.