Political Web Sites Post-Election Not Doing As Bad As You'd Think

Now that the presidential election is over and Sarah Palin has skulked back to Alaska, we had wondered how politics sites could survive a massive drop-off in post-election traffic.

But according to number-crunching whiz kid Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com (itself a fledgling politics site), the predicted drop-off in traffic hasn't happened to everyone. A few politics-heavy Web sites (The Atlantic, Drudge, HuffPo) are even doing better.

Here's Nate's analysis of how well sites have done retaining their pre-election audiences (see his site for the full methodology). But big disclaimer up front: traffic numbers are based on Alexa, at best an imperfect tool.

Doing well: (Percentage of pre-election traffic retained post-election.)

• TheAtlantic.com: 125%
• DrudgeReport.com: 124%
• HuffingtonPost.com: 109%
• NYTimes.com: 97%

Of course, not everyone is surviving. Ouch:

• Electoral-Vote.com: 30%
• RealClearPolitics.com: 25%
• RasmussenReports.com: 15%
• Gallup.com: 12%
• JohnMcCain.com: 9%

And fivethirtyeight.com itself? Retaining 59% of its traffic. But Nate, you have access to better analytics for your own site than Alexa. Why don't you give publish the real numbers so we know how accurate your analysis is?

See Also:
How Politics Sites Plan To Survive Post-Election
Three Reasons Political Sites Are Glad The Election Is Over