Circulation

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

I used to work at a local weekly newspaper.  Nobody special, as a matter of fact about the lowest guy on the totem pole.  Among my jobs were keeping the back issue catalog, News Stand sales, and picking up ad copy.

Still I did learn a thing or two and one of them is that we charged for ads based on our circulation.

While my newspaper’s circulation was monitored by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, here on the blogs there are various methods of measuring eyeballs most of which require either constant attention or money to track.

Fortunately I’ve stumbled on a way to measure impact that doesn’t need either of those.

As you may have noticed in the extreme right column of DocuDharma, beneath our donation bowl, is the ad from the Advertise Liberaly Blog Ads Network.

I happened to notice it when I was surfing one of the usual suspects and much to my surprise mishima’s Random Japan turned up as one of the sponsors.

I asked mishima how that happened and evidently he’s as puzzled as I still am but by clicking the more link I got to the page where you can order ads on various liberal blogs including ours and I thought I’d share with you their listing of impressions per week as of today- 8/28/09.

Groups broken by magnitude.  Millions, Hundreds of Thousands, Tens of Thousands, Thousands.

* == On Daily Kos Blogroll

Somehow I missed Mahablog yesterday which at 13,893 impressions per week (as of today the 29th) would have ranked 77th.

Any blogs on that list you recognize?

Actually I’d urge you to click on the links because it’s very instructive to see what other people are doing in terms of presentation and what they are talking about in terms of topics.  Also how active they are in comparison to us, Cursor.org (#69) shut its doors in October 2008.

It’s not an inclusive blogroll (no Greenwald or Firedog Lake for instance) but it does cover a fairly wide swath of the lefty blogosphere.

I’ll remind you again that these numbers and rankings were sampled Friday, August 28th, because they bounce around a bit, especially in the middle.  I’m sorry, but this is a complicated table that took me two days to prepare.

But it’s not really so much a matter of who’s is bigger as it is how big you are.

I sometimes get discouraged when I see an essay slide off uncommented and unrecced.  Not so much that I’ll personally intervene mind you because I also have strong opinions about perceptions of favoratism and the proper role of Admins, but I do worry that the Author will think their work was totally ignored.

Not true.  I read every essay (though not every comment).

What is really significant for me is not our 57th out of 138 ranking but our 26 thousand impressions a week.

As my Dad points out, that’s just as large as the circulation of the newspaper I used to work at.

We are approaching our second anniversary as a blog and I’m quite proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish.  15.7K Essays.  238K Comments.

Not only that, but in my Google Impact DocuDharma consistently outweighs my Daily Kos presence.

I never talk with buhdy about the money and I’m not in a position to contribute any more than I do, but if you have a product, service, or position you’d care to promote our rates are quite reasonable compared to some and we’d love to have your business.

And never doubt your impact.

YELL LOUDER!