Conservative media personality Tucker Carlson is very well known for being called out by Jon Stewart on former CNN show Crossfire. Carlson is now planning to launch a news website that competes directly to The Huffington Post. Carlson plans to launch a website called TheDailyCaller.com, but more from a conservative news angle.
Carlson claims that his website will focus on “telling the truth and be accurate.” The journalists on TheDailyCaller.com will share in the profits. The motto of TheDailyCaller is “every seven minutes” because Carlson claims that breaking news will happen a lot faster than The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report.
Personally I’m not much of a fan of Tucker Carlson because of the attitude he had during the program below. I’m a big fan of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. I believe that maintaining humor in the serious world of politics is a great mix to have. Questioning Comedy Central’s credibility as a defensive strategy did not seem to give Carlson much merit. And in terms of being able to compete with The Drudge Report, I think that may be a joke because Drudge is already very established and has a massive audience.
Yesterday The Wall Street Journal published an article about how Democrats are winning in the polls and online. As a matter of fact, the traffic of liberal political blog, HuffingtonPost.com (HuffPo) has skyrocketed. Their traffic numbers have quadrupled since last year. As of September 2008, HuffPo received 4.5 million uniques per month. Drudgereport.com, the conservative blog had 2 million uniques.
Below is an image I pulled from The WSJ, collected from comScore:
As of September of last year, drudgereport.com had about 1.2 million and HuffPo had 792,000 uniques. Talkingpointsmemo.com had gone from 32,000 uniques to 458,000 uniques over the last year. Talking Points Memo started around 2000 during the Florida vote recount process. Conservative blog, RedState.com jumped from 38,000 uniques last year to 235,000 uniques this year.
Another trend that is easy to notice is that HuffPo seems to be dominating the Digg homepage these days. In the last 2 days, HuffPo had over 11 articles hit the Digg homepage. Check out the screenshot below of the last 8 stories:
I did a similar search query for the DrudgeReport.com and the last time they had reached the Digg homepage was 94 days ago. That right there tells you something about why they are dropping in traffic.
This also tells you something about Digg too. Digg users tend to prefer reading a liberal bias view during the course of this election. There is a direct correlation between Huffington Post traffic soaring and the sudden popularity of Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin. This will become even more apparent after the conclusion of the voting process on November 4.
