Blogs Not Big Enough for Daily Kos Founder

Posted on January 18, 2006

TomPaine.com is reporting that Markos Moulitsas, the creator of the popular Daily Kos site, a progressive blog and web community, said that the blog and websites like MoveOn were still not big enough to get their message heard by enough people.

"It saddens me that Daily Kos is the largest progressive media outlet," Moulitsas mused, in response to a question about the effects the Internet will have on progressive politics in the years to come. "We can't just put it all on the blogs and MoveOn and hope that this is future, because if it is, we're in trouble." These were strange words to hear from a man who has made his name with a blog. But odd as it seemed to me at the time, Moulitsas is almost certainly right: Unstoppable and ever-expanding though the Internet appears, web-based progressivism is not a substitute for the traditional political infrastructure, nor will it be anytime soon.

The article says that Daily Kos gets an amazing five million pageviews each week but that is just 1/3 to 1/4 of Rush Limbaugh's 14 to 20 million listeners.

Consider the numbers: Daily Kos gets about five million page views a week. That's not chump change, but Rush Limbaugh still gets somewhere between 14 and 20 million listeners in the same period of time. The contrast with cable news is equally striking: While Moulitsas gets about 700,000 page views a day, almost four times as many people tune into cable news stations during primetime alone, and more than twice as many watch Fox. Nine of the top 10 highest rated cable news programs are on Fox.
The bottom line--and it is a bottom line Moulitsas was manifestly aware of--is that blogs aren't reaching an audience anywhere near the same size as the traditional news outlets.

It sounds like Markos Moulitsas will need a TV or radio deal to vault his viewership up to the level of Limbaugh. Still with five million visitors a week and with blogs still growing the Daily Kos site is probably still gaining ground. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh continues to charge for his archives -- a policy which likely limits readership.