Is Hillary's Guestblogging Bad for Blog Traffic?

There has been discussion in the blogosphere about whether or not it is beneficial for Hillary to be guestblogging at a site like Firedoglake. But maybe someone should be asking Firedoglake if it is beneficial to their site to have Hillary guestblogging there. A Washington Post blogger who wonders why Hillary is posting at FDL mentions that: "Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer said Hamsher's blog was picked because 'there are 100,000 people who frequent this site and we wanted to have a conversation with them.'"

Ann Althouse points out that FDL does not actually have 100,000 visitors a day as the WaPo declared but rather, about 80,000 visitors. After reading that yesterday, I took a look at FDL's site meter and indeed, it read at around 81,000 unique visitors for the previous week. However, today (Saturday morning), it reads only 68,485 unique visitors a day--a decrease in average traffic of over 12,000 visitors and it is not even the start of the weekend yet, so the decreased weekend traffic did not seem to account for the drop. And if you look at their traffic for the past month, there was a big spike the week before, but nothing significant when Hillary started blogging.

Wow, I know visitors can flunctuate during the week but if FDL's traffic is decreasing due to Hillary's publicity stunt, what does that say about how the site's readers feel about Hillary? She's certainly not bringing them any new traffic.