For the first time in its history, Maryland Politics Watch has been the most-visited state political blog in Maryland over a four-month period.
From October 2008 through January 2009, here are the most-visited political blogs in the Free State according to Sitemeter:
1. Maryland Politics Watch: 45,654
2. Red Maryland: 43,022
3. Baltimore Reporter: 19,570
4. Annapolis Capital Punishment: 18,988
5. Pillage Idiot: 17,376
6. Monoblogue: 15,162
7. PG Politics: 14,988
8. Howard County: 14,928
9. Free State Politics: 12,547
10. Annapolis Politics: 7,367
11. Brian Griffiths: 6,387
A few notes:
1. The above list only includes blogs that are focused on state and local politics. We do not include local blogs that are not primarily political in content. We examined them here. We also do not include national blogs or MSM sites.
2. Many blogs do not reveal their Sitemeter statistics. O’Malley Watch would almost certainly be one of the leaders if the anonymous author released its visit counts.
3. Pillage Idiot and Free State Politics have stopped publishing.
4. Brian Griffiths and Michael Swartz of Monoblogue cross-post on Red Maryland.
5. Kenny Burns of Maryland Politics Today stopped disclosing his Sitemeter counts after we revealed that his blog was one of the least-read political blogs last summer. His statistics cannot be verified without publicly-available, third-party verification from Sitemeter or a similar service.
6. Sitemeter counts do not include Google Reader subscribers. The leading state political sites on that measure are MPW (112), Red Maryland (68), Free State Politics (63), O’Malley Watch (50), Howard County (49) and Maryland Politics Today (22).
7. MPW ranked number one in November, December and January, breaking a 12-month leader streak by Red Maryland.
8. We expect Red Maryland to resume its top rank in the near future because it has a large number of bloggers from all over the state and is the last refuge for Maryland conservatives. But the gap between the top two political blogs and the rest is significant.
Update: PG Politics blog now discloses its visit counts and we include them above.
Update 2: Kenny Burns of Maryland Politics Today is protesting his exclusion from this list even though he admits deleting Sitemeter. Burns says the following about my attempt to verify his counts:
More importantly, his claim of revelation from last summer was more than likely based on an email he sent me in August, shortly after my site’s relaunch, which said:
“Mr. Burns, I don’t see Sitemeter up on your blog anymore. Did you disconnect it? I am collecting data for a possible update to my Maryland Blogdom series on Maryland Politics Watch.”
More than likely, I did not reply to this email, not because I didn’t want to, it’s due to the fact I get dozens of emails a day and I cannot keep up with them all.
When Burns employed Sitemeter, it reported a combined visit count of 8,133 from February through June of 2008. His new statistics report a combined visit count of 68,365 for those months. None of this passes the smell test. Or the laugh test.