Q&A Friday #44: What’s The Verdict On Pajamas Media So Far?

Question: “After all of the initial buzz, positive and negative, about Pajamas Media, how would you rate their success and the impact they have had?” — Buckley_F_Williams

Answer: Pajamas started out with an enormous wave of attention that was quickly followed by a similarly enormous wave of criticism.

One of the biggest attacks on them was that their website design was awful. That problem seems to have been solved because they have a superb layout now and are pumping out lots of content from their member blogs. So, they’re looking good in that area.

However, from there on out, things look a little shakier.

The enormous buzz around Pajamas Media has really died down and although they do a project here and there to draw in a little extra attention, they really don’t seem to be much discussed in the blogosphere these days.

Traffic wise, I don’t know how much their main page does, but it only seems to deliver a couple of hundred hits from a link. Based on that and their Alexa ranking, I’m going to speculate that they do between 12,500-17,500 daily uniques per day. That might be a little high or a little low, but with no open statistics counter, it’s a best guess.

As far as their expenses and ad revenue goes, it’s impossible to say with the opaque way that they operate, but I suspect that they have much lower ad rates than people realize and with their limited volume, high overhead, and contracts, I’d have to guess that they’ve lost a lot of money since they debuted last November.

They’ve also still been unable to make any headway in pulling in a significant number of left-of-center blogs and don’t seem to be appealing much to blogs outside of the “club.” PJ Media is currently the 478th most linked website in the The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem which is, to tell you the truth, pretty bad for a website of their size.

It’s also rather noteworthy that, for whatever reason, they seem to be adding very few new blogs onto the roster. I’m only counting 89 “PJ Bloggers” on their side bar.

As far as their impact goes, they haven’t done anything revolutionary so far, but you never know what the future holds for PJM. They certainly have a lot of talented bloggers under contract, they should still be flush with cash after initially receiving 3.5 million dollars, and Charles Johnson & Roger Simon are both sharp guys. So, who knows what the future holds for them? Hopefully, they’ll turn out to be very successful.

Full Disclosure: I run the Conservative Blog Advertising Network for a Pajamas Media competitor, Blogads.

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