Blog traffic is down since the US elections.
Blog traffic is up since January.

This is a completely US-centric analysis and an interesting one.
Anyone that read blogs prior to the US elections would have said that hits-traffic would be down after the election for pundits.

Anyone that reads blogs knows that they have become more known, and by extention more checked out or read.

As this writer points out, it’s a bit like reporting the weather by saying ‘it rained, the grass is wet.’

Okay, pundit traffic is down, overall surfing of blogs is up. What’s the story?

However, as a percentage of Web traffic, blog readership is down. Hitwise, an Internet analysis firm, did a special report for CBS MarketWatch and found that while visits to the 15 most popular political blogs accounted for 0.02 percent of all U.S. traffic in early October, the percentage fell to 0.011 percent at the end of November.

Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads.com, a network for advertisers to place ads across hundreds of blogs, isn’t worried about the decline. “The game of politics is largely on hold, but blogs are still much bigger than they were six months ago.” Copeland said the experience of Kos and Instapundit holds true for all other blogs, too. “The good news is that a new couple of layers of info-consumers have been infected with blog reading,” he said.

The Hitwise report is challenged by Jeff Jarvis, new media chief at Advance.net and the blogger behind BuzzMachine.com. “We know that Nielsen is flawed and that’s dealing with just a few networks and a large sample,” he said. “Now stretch that methodology to millions of sites, and it’s unreliable.” Furthermore, neither Hitwise nor Sitemeter analyses report the audience that uses the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed to read bloggers. “In this new world,” Jarvis said, “we have to work together to come up with standard reporting - Web, RSS and mobile - to accurately report the audience.”

That audience is growing rapidly, argues Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs Inc., and the publisher of 65 non-political Weblogs. “Traffic across our network is up 20 to 30 percent a month, every month. We saw no spikes or dips before or after the election.”

And trust me, these numbers matter in the US. As more and more businesses, marketers, developers and bloggers look to cash in on blogs or look to gain political power or prestige or market, we’ll see more of this kind of analysis, off blogs and in other streams of conversation.

There is almost a holy war going on in some sectors of the blogosphere with an on-going jockeying for position (either/or) between old media or main stream media and blogs.

To the millions of people blogging in different languages around the world, this economic/power debate is a non-issue. On an unseen level it matters. Technology developers need money or require money once they are up and running. (SixApart- Technorati as examples) MSN just launched it’s blog platform Spaces in the US. It is proprietary, it’s integrated, not unlike the AOL blog platform introduced last year. It’s a bandwagon companies are deciding to jump onto.

And for the average non-tech consumer just getting into the blogging game, this is okay with them. And it is quite okay with the business sector.

For those of us who don’t care about clout, a war with main stream media, biz-blog opportunities, marketing or about what political party is noticing us, we’ll keep doing what we’re doing, amused that webblogging is the current fad pursued by movers and shakers.
I think this type of attention is merely the next phase. Bloggers are consumers, after all, but not all bloggers blog to consumers.