'Top of the Ticket' catches on

The Times seems happy with the traffic performance of its national politics blog, which has been covering the presidential races mostly in posts by Andrew Malcolm and Don Frederick. It surpassed the Lakers blog, usually the most popular, and in December posted the highest numbers ever for an LAT blog. An internal email from Innovation Editor Russ Stanton says the numbers are up across the board, but the stats show that several of the paper's two dozen or more blogs just aren't catching on.

Jan. 3, 2008

Comrades:

Want to pass along some new numbers re our blog traffic. If Top Of The Ticket were a presidential candidate, the boys would take Iowa in a landslide.

TOTT accounted for one-third of our blog traffic for the month of December, pounding the vaunted Lakers blog into the hardwood floor. Yesterday, 10% of the visits to the site were to TOTT, which is an astounding amount for a single destination. (Only time I've seen that previously was the day Paris Hilton was sentenced to jail time.)

Anywho, below is a look at our overall blog traffic trends for the both December and all of 2007, to put things in broader perspective. Our blog traffic in 2007 totaled 26.25 million page views, nearly triple what we did in 2006. Despite its late summer launch, TOTT accounted for 7% of total blog traffic. A great start.

Russ Stanton
Innovation Editor

Monthly totals:

December: 3,475,581 page views (new monthly traffic record!)
November: 2,992,827 PVs
October: 3,008,179 PVs
September: 2,331,484 PVs
August: 2,178,616 PVs
July: 2,160,849 PVs

Top 15 blogs (trafficwise) for December:
1. Top of the Ticket - 1,022,229 PVs (new single-blog traffic record!)
2. Lakers - 423,464 PVs
3. Homicide Report - 247,611 PVs
4. Show Tracker - 202,706 PVs
5. Env. Gold Derby - 189,791 PVs
6. Env. Dish Rag - 162,877 PVs
7. Travel - 102,018 PVs
8. Daily Dish - 99,925 PVs
9. L.A. Land - 98,068 PVs
10. What's Bruin - 95,059 PVs
11. Varsity Times Insider - 91,069 PVs
12. Env. Extended Play - 61,378 PVs
13. Dodgers - 57,311 PVs
14. All Things Trojan - 55,949 PVs
15. Bottleneck - 52,600 PVs

Most of those numbers are quite modest for staff blogs with the Times' reach behind them — and remember, there are another ten-ish with lower totals. By comparison, LA Observed — a small site in the scheme of things — had somewhere around 400,000 page views in December, per AWStats. We also set a record for ourselves in 2007 with more than 3.9 million visits; page views will take longer to compile from the logs, but they easily set a new high for the site.