I can't believe any of you take this guy seriously anymore. What an embarassment.
Let's compare TAP's honest, forthright, and dilligent response to this silly numbers game with Crazy Andy's tantrum against Romenesko and Scalzi (and Alterman, although Alterman probably fired the first shot on this one) when they questioned his numbers (here and here).
ROMENESKO VERSUS BLOGS: Medianews' Romenesko does what he can to trash andrewsullivan.com again - by linking to a blog! John Scalzi's piece all but accuses this site and others of fibbing about our numbers. (Scalzi, it should be remembered is Ted Rall's good friend.) Scalzi uses Norah Vincent's equation of "hits" with "visits" to suggest that my daily visit numbers are perhaps one fifth of what I've reported. Here's what my not fantastically sophisticated server tells me: last week, this site got 220,000 visits from 76,000 unique visitors. Our best day was Wednesday when we got 40,000 visits from 23,000 unique visitors. On a monthly basis, we're now over 800,000 visits from over 200,000 unique visitors. Are we bigger than the New York Times? Of course not. But that's not the right comparison. Better to compare a news service like Drudge with a news service like the Times. Scalzi says the Times gets 2.2 million visitors a week. According to his site, Drudge gets 4 million visits a day. Let's be very conservative and say that amounts to 1 million unique visitors a day. I'd say Drudge beats the New York Times website hands down. Of course, he provides only a tiny fraction of their original reporting. But if you're looking for news stories, his web-page clearly out-performs the Times, and on the web, a page is a page is a page. It seems to me the right comparison for opinion bloggers like Instapundit or yours truly would be either visits to individual columnists online or visits to opinion magazines. I'm pretty sure National Review Online beats us all. But I'd be interested to know if the online versions of the Nation or The New Republic beat individual bloggers by a large amount. And remember that our pages are staffed by one, rather than around a dozen or so. When you look at it that way, bloggers' contribution to the debate - in a matter of months, really - is pretty astounding. But the broader point is: this is not a zero-sum game. The old media won't disappear, nor should they. The Times, for all its flaws, is an absolutely indispensable institution, and I hope to God it stays that way. What bloggers do is break up smug monopolies, disperse editorial power and give unheard voices a chance to get a megaphone. It seems to me only the truly insecure or untalented have anything to worry about. (Which may account for Eric Alterman's panic.)
[emphasis mine]
Scalzi had this to say:
[Sullivan Says:] "John Scalzi's piece all but accuses this site and others of fibbing about our numbers. (Scalzi, it should be remembered is Ted Rall's good friend.)"
This is an interesting rhetorical maneuver. Ted Rall, as you'll no doubt recall, is the cartoonist whose "Terror Widows" cartoon caused a national uproar, and indeed, I am one of the few people who did not immediately call for Ted to be shot for treason for drawing it (if you missed the fracas, the details are here). For those of conservative bent, Ted is the sort of deranged, fire-breathing liberal who is easy to hate because he's wrong about everything and almost certainly eats babies with a knife and fork and tasty dipping sauce. So by allying me with Ted, what Sullivan is saying is:
From a technique point of view I think this is a nice attempt by Sullivan to deflect credibility, but I think it signals that Sullivan recognized he's arguing from a position of weakness. If he had more confidence in what his numbers actually meant, he wouldn't have had to try to slam the messenger by bringing up his friends; either that or he can't help bringing up Ted's name to frighten the children at every opportunity.
(Also, to be clear, I don't suspect Sullivan was lying about his numbers, although it seems evident that prior to the columns he wasn't entirely sure what his numbers represented, or didn't represent, as the case may be. This is not especially his fault -- ultimately, it's an abstruse concept, and hopefully the end result of the last couple of days is a clearer understanding for everyone what the stats are, and what they actually report.)
Anyway, I know Andy loves to stir up controversy. But, stuff like this confirms the notion that Howell Raines canned his ass not because of his oh-so-dangerous-contrarian-conservative-views, but because he's a sloppy journalist and an immature unprofessional little baby.
Eric Alterman also notes that Andy's been lying about what he says on his website here (scroll down) and a bit about the numbers here.