I generally try not to go too far off-topic, but … well, it’s Friday, and I figured this might be of interest to you.
Below I have listed a series of prominent, politically-oriented websites, and compared them on their ability to retain traffic in the post-election environment. The way that I have calculated this is to take the 1-week average daily reach number from Alexa.com (representing post-election traffic) and divided it into the 3-month average daily reach number for the same site (representing — principally — pre-election traffic from the convention period onward, the juicy part of the four-year election cycle). For instance, Slate.com has reached 598 out of every 1 million global internet users on an average day in the past week, as compared with 892 on an average day over the past three months, for a retention percentage of 67 percent.
TheAtlantic.com 125%
DrudgeReport.com 124%
HuffingtonPost.com 109%
NYTimes.com 97%
WashingtonPost.com 82%
FOXNews.com 78%
TalkingPointsMemo.com 71%
DailyKos.com 68%
Slate.com 67%
RedState.com 66%
NationalReview.com 63%
FiveThirtyEight.com 59%
Politico.com 55%
Pollster.com 37%
BarackObama.com 37%
Electoral-Vote.com 30%
RealClearPolitics.com 25%
RasmussenReports.com 15%
Gallup.com 12%
JohnMcCain.com 9%
Any number of caveats apply — including that Alexa.com estimates are usually pretty blunt insturments(although they’re a little bit better for relatively large sites like these). But you see the sites running along something of a spectrum from campaign-specific to general political (and sometimes cultural) interest.
Our retention percentage is 59 percent, which I’m actually very, very pleased with. Thank you for visiting us during the run-up to the election and thank you for continuing to visit us now. I haven’t done one of those “what’s next for FiveThirtyEight” posts yet, but I will do so soon; rest assured that we are in this for the long haul.