Wikio Politics: Liberal Conspiracy overtakes Guido Fawkes in rankings. EXCLUSIVE
I have the advanced post for this month’s Wikio Politics rankings, and there’s the first change in the Top 3 since (I think) September 2008.
Liberal Conspiracy has moved (just) into the 2nd position, ahead of Guido Fawkes.
The figure on the right is the actual Wikio Score, which I have included for the first 10 sites. This illustrates how close Liberal Conspiracy is to Guido Fawkes, and also Tom Harris’ blog “And Another Thing” is to LabourList. These can be checked using the “Sources” option on the Wikio Labs website.
The Wikio ranking is measured by incoming editorial links (i.e., not blogrolls) from blogs registered with Wikio which appear in RSS feeds. To be clear (again), this is no measure of traffic. Links are weighted by time, prominence of the linking blog, and prominence of the link in the linking article.
For now, I’ll just make these comments:
1 – Most of the blogs at the top end are now very heavily linked in to the Mainstream Media and Social Media, almost as opinionated independent extensions. Liberal Conspiracy, for example, receives much of its traffic from the Guardian, Twitter and Facebook.
2 – For those interested in growing your blogs – which may or may not be a primary objective, Social Media is becoming key (as opposed to being “an important opportunity”.
3 – There are three separate blogs in the Top 30 run by women; I think that is a first.
4 – Expect a shake up next month, as we move away from the Election period. Next Left has a notable jump, and I’d expect that to be maintained if the quality of the output persists.
5 – For some reason Paul Waugh of the Standard has been categorised as a non-political blog; he would be in the Top 20 in this list otherwise.
I’ve been doing blog number crunching this week, so I’ll do a full run down of Wikio scores for the top 100 blogs, to follow up my Top 100 post last week, income from political blogs, and online chat business model rundown at the weekend, this afternoon.
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Categories: All WW, Comment, Media, News - Current Affairs, Political Blogging, Politics
Great stuff, Matt. Thanks. I’ll get Paul Waugh in for next month.
Regards,
Dan
Wikio UK
If you order the top five in terms of traffic (Google absolute uniques in the last calendar month), it comes in the order 3, 1, 5, 2 (with ConHome omitted as no published data).
Suggests not much relationship at this level between links and traffic.
btw According to me, you are up 2 places to 44.
Indeed, as you’d expect (ignoring the Uniques vs Page Views mudfight as you have), Wikio measures blog links and most of these get their traffic from non-blog sources.
On the traffic ranks, I’d probably put Samizdata, Old Holborn and perhaps EUReferendum in the mix too. Possibly Socialist Unity (http://www.blogtopsites.com/sitedetails_14820.html). Unsure about Political Betting.
There are quite a number of blogs in the 50-100k uniques category now, too.
This is one for a Sunday night online chat.
Yet, one of my theories is that the future landscape will be shaped by authority (reliability + brand) not popularity (traffic).
[...] According to Wikio, Liberal Conspiracy is now the second most talked about blog online: The Wikio ranking is measured by incoming editorial links (i.e., not blogrolls) from blogs registered with Wikio which appear in RSS feeds. To be clear (again), this is no measure of traffic. Links are weighted by time, prominence of the linking blog, and prominence of the link in the linking article. [...]
Mark – those traffic figures are difficult to pin down exactly. Paul Staines cited ‘blog hits’ which is a useless measure of anything. We didn’t get an absolute unique visitors figure. Dale decided to bump up his Abs Unique Visitor numbers by including a RSS reader number of 25,000+ when it’s not clear where get got that from.
It’s impossible to know how many people are reading you via RSS feeds as far as I’m aware. I didn’t include any RSS feed numbers in my figures, as didn’t LDV.
Also, shouldn’t this metric now also start including links from Twitter for example? Especially given that most blogs now get so much traffic via Twitter (not jsust LC)
Personally, I’d want Twitter as a separate metric, as it is a different category of traffic – independent blog commentary is different from MSM commentary too.
Though clever nerds will note that Wikio France has a service called Twikio http://labs.wikio.net/fr/twikio“ which could be used to generate such a metric once an analysis process has been set up…
Sunny: Paul Staines has provided Google Absolute Unique Visitor figures (for calendar month), excluding RSS, so on that basis we can make like for like comparison. For last month that puts him around double Lib Dem Voice, which in turn was just ahead of LC.
Pretty sure that Iain Dale’s figures that I was using also don’t include RSS, but will go back and check.