DailyKos.com, the Grand Central Station of the online Democratic left, had a record-breaking year, the site’s founder Markos Moulitsas announced last Friday. For the last thirty days before Election Day, the site garnered more than 4 million unique visitors, according to its Quantcast stats. That’s up from 1.8 million uniques for the month of January, or 2.3 million that it garnered during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement in October 2011.
While some progressive political blogs are struggling to survive, thanks to a the decline in political online advertising spent on their sites, DKos is thriving. Reports of the progressive blogosphere’s overall demise are therefore premature. Not only do mainstream advertisers continue to purchase space on its pages, its users are also a fertile source of campaign money as well. More than 109,000 people donated to political candidates via Daily Kos’s 2012 ActBlue page, raising $3.3 million in all.
Election Day, the site had just over 500,000 unique visitors, 50% more than on Election Day 2008, Will Rockafellow, the site’s general manager, tells techPresident. “The increase on the election day isn’t what’s impressive,” he notes. “Election days, much like debate days, are usually for our hardcore addicts. What’s more impressive is that our biggest days for uniques have been days without a major political news event. For instance, our most uniques ever was on Monday Oct 15.”
That day DKos had nearly 715,000 unique visitors. Two stories helped drive that traffic, Rockafellow says, one a diary titled “
November 14, 2012