It’s been a bizarre last several months at Daily Kos. From record highs, to a post-primary crash, to record highs again, all in the span of five months. Take a look at the last 12 months of site traffic:
That top gray line is 15 million unique visitors (which we haven’t hit yet). The solid blue line is domestic traffic, the gray one includes international. In March this year, Daily Kos hit 14.7 million unique visitors, our all-time high (it’s the big peak in the middle). A month later, it was way down at 8.85 million uniques. The primaries were effectively over and I wasn’t shy about saying so. So, a whole lotta people decided to take a break from the site, whether out of anger, disappointment, spite, or exhaustion. We expected a drop, but 40 percent? Honestly, we didn’t expect that. In fact, May and June were our worst months in all of 2015 and 2016, except for the holiday month of December 2015. And we even approached that all-time low. Decembers are always dead.
Daily Kos unique visitors Traffic, in millions
|
2016 |
2015 |
January |
10.2 |
11.6 |
February |
11.6 |
9.1 |
March |
14.7 |
10.2 |
April |
8.9 |
8.9 |
May |
8.2 |
10.6 |
June |
8.4 |
13.5 |
July |
13.6 |
11.7 |
August |
TBD |
9.8 |
September |
TBD |
10.2 |
October |
TBD |
9.9 |
November |
TBD |
8.9 |
December |
TBD |
7.8 |
And then July came. The party united. We had two fascinating conventions. We expected people to show up for the Republican one. Who doesn’t love gawking at a car wreck? But we certainly didn’t expect to exceed those audience numbers the next week during the Democratic convention. But we did. And despite having a quiet Fourth of July week to kick things off, July was the second-best month in our history. And those 13.6 million unique visitors were good for 63.5 million pageviews.
To put that in context, that currently ranks us as the 123th largest website in the United States according to Quantcast, ahead of MSNBC (#140), CNBC (#148), Salon (#149), Bloomberg (#193), E Online (#195), WSJ.com (#209), Upworthy (#272), CBS News (#278), NBC (#282), The Atlantic (#299), and The Nation (#1,614).
And the first three days of August are already through the roof, with yesterday’s traffic among the five biggest days of the entire year. With the Donald Trump Reality Show getting really good, it shouldn’t be surprising that ratings are following suit. Daily Kos continues to be the go-to place for the latest political news and discussion, and the more chat-worthy the news, the more people visit.
But it’s not just our website. Our email list has punched through the two-million mark (2.03 million) after being stalled at around 1.9 million for the longest time. (Unlike many, we only count active emails, otherwise we could brag about the 3.1 million emails on our list.) And last week, over 17 million people saw our content on Facebook. And if you think that’s a shit-ton (because it is!), that number was 25 million during each of the convention weeks.
And by the way? When I say “our content”, I mean our content, yours as well as my staff’s. We promote community content heavily on both our headline email newsletters and on our Facebook page. What good is an audience if we aren’t educating it with the best we all have to offer?
It’s only a theory, but I suspect Daily Kos, more than ever, reflects the liberal id. No one was happy as the primaries were winding down. Bernie Sanders supporters were angry that their guy had lost. Hillary Clinton supporters were angry that the primary was being dragged out. Everyone was angry that the other side was angry. It was an easy time to shut down and say “fuck it, I’m tuning out.” yet now, in this post-unity phase, with the threat of Donald Trump hanging over us and an opportunity for historic gains in the House, Senate, and state houses and legislatures, well, people are back and fully engaged. Heck, I’ve even seen people back who were conflict-averse and sat out the entire primary season.
This site is large, it’s complex, it has tons of moving parts. A gathering of people this big has to be. It defies easy categorization, and it’s hard to ascribe motivation. But no matter how hard we beat each other up, we all have a tendency to come together when it most matters.