It’s an article of faith among the digerati that one of the things that keeps people coming back to your site is a community: the opportunity to interact, both with the site’s authors and with other visitors.
Now there’s a little more proof, and it comes from the battleground of American partisan blogs. Chris Bowers at MyDD analyzed traffic at the leading Republican/right-wing and Democratic/liberal blogs, and found two things.
One, whereas les than two years ago the right-wing blogs had more than twice the raw traffic of their centre-left counterparts, those numbers are now nearly reversed.
And two, the reason may well be community:
Of the twenty-four liberal blogs in the top quintile, Dailykos, TPM Caf?©, Smirking Chimp, Metafilter, BooMan Tribune, MyDD, and Dembloggers are full-fledged community sites where members cannot only comment, but they can also post diaries / articles / polls.
By comparison, there are no community sites among the top twenty-four conservative blogs. None, zip, zero, nada. This is particularly stunning when one considers the importance of the Free Republic community to the conservative netroots. While it would appear that there are hordes of Glenn Reynolds wannabe’s among conservatives in the netroots, Redstate.org sticks out as the only success story for a community oriented blog within the conservative blogosphere.
In fact, of the five most trafficked conservative blogs (over 200,000 page views per week), only one, Little Green Footballs, even allows comments, much less the ability to actually write a diary or a new article.
The nine liberal community sites I listed in the paragraph above have accounted for the bulk of the exceptional growth of the liberal blogosphere over the past two years.
Bowers also suggests that sites with community features become incubators for like-minded online voices.
An entire generation of popular liberal bloggers grew out of the Dailykos diaries and comments: Billmon, Steve Soto, Steve Gillard, Melanie, DemfromCT, DhinMI, Theoria, Tom Schaller, Meteor Blades, DavidNYC, myself, SusanHu, Jerome a Paris, lapin, Maryscott O’Conner, NYCO, Mariascat, and many, many more. I believe that the wave of new talent and fresh voices that the comments and dairy options bring to a blog has been the key factor in the liberal blogosphere outpacing the growth of the right wing blogosphere. Every day brings more reasons to read the highly trafficked liberal blogs. Every two weeks or so brings a new liberal blog from someone who has already become famous as a diarist.
