I just read Kos' diary about the Daily Kos setting traffic record after traffic record every month. That's great news because my worry is that the liberal blogoshere is otherwise dead. Remember when Digby, TPM and progressive sites actually impacted the news cycle. Now it seems that the news cycle is dominated by either the right or the craven - witness folks like Charles Johnson and countless others on the right who seem to driving the news.
As Kos pointed out in his diary, some of the main conservative sites are declining in traffic but I believe that's because there are a ton more conservative sites and that the new right wing sites are stealing traffic from the old established sites but that - on our side - the established progressive sites are disappearing and are not being replaced. My impression - and I hope I"m wrong - is that the online energy is on the other side these days. Except for Daily Kos, the other sites that used to help us drive the news cycle - like TPM, 538, and others - are running out of gas or visitors.
Look at TPM's quantcast numbers - Josh's uniques are down by 22%. Sam Wang is barely publishing. Five Thirty Eight has become a weird craven shadow of itself.
The only new positive story I can think of these days is Vox (and the huge success of progressive sites like Buzzfeed, Upworthy and Gawker).
My hunch/worry is that Google may have killed the liberal blogosphere. I know a liberal green publisher and what he told me is that the Google network developed the abliity to replicate his audience and sell ads for that demographic. This obviously drove his ad rates down (and made his biz unstainable). I'd guess this might have happened to other small publishers.
The guys on the right, ironically, have never needed to sell ads, make money to stay in business. The conservative funders give them $ for driving the narrative. Our guys need to make a living.
This makes me thankful for Daily Kos. I would, though, appreciate Kos' and others in the know thoughts about all this in terms of what happened to the progressive blogsphere and the (great) people who provided so much energy (and advantage) to the progressive stay when the liberal blogosphere was ascendent. I wonder if the diminishment of the progressive side only is why Obama can never catch a break these days. There is no real push from the progressive side anymore on the media.