One of the questions asked by many of my friends and relatives, and not just a few from the blogging clique, concerned blog traffic after the presidential election. Everyone expected traffic to cool off, but no one knew how much it would drop, and in the age of blogads, that question was not merely academic or ego-driven. At CQ, I told people that I expected unique visits to drop to about half of what they were in October, and given that such a number would be a dramatic improvement over what we had earlier in the year, I would be thrilled.

As it turns out, my guess wound up being fairly accurate, but no one I know has done much more to analyze post-election blog traffic. Now N.Z. Bear of the TTLB Ecosystem (where I'm currently ranked 12th for links and 23rd for traffic) has written his own detailed analysis for Tech Central Station, titled "A Post-Election Blog Funk?" NZB notes that for most major bloggers, the election provided an overall improvement in traffic numbers:

This result appears to be consistent across many of the top political blogs. Figure 3 shows a more detailed review of Average Daily Visits for ten of the highest traffic political weblogs. Comparing their December Average Daily Visits to their January - June averages shows that all ten are still at or above their traffic levels for the first half of the year, before the pre-election surge began in earnest. The amount varies: from Eschaton, which is essentially down to almost its January-June average (up 5%) to blogs like Captain's Quarters and MyDD, which found their audiences exploding during 2004 and are now up 500% and 929%, respectively.

NZB uses December averages, but my daily traffic has actually rebounded a bit since then to around 15,000. Even so, the 500% traffic increase at CQ also comes from the relative newness of this blog in January of last year, when I had averaged around 1,000 or less a day. Still, other major bloggers have posted extraordinary gains: Kos is up 186%, Hugh Hewitt 178%, and even the indispensable Instapundit increased its visits by 42%. While we haven't recaptured our peak traffic, we've certainly maintained our momentum.

Read Bear's entire analysis.

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