I Told You People Like Wonkette And Michelle Malkin Were Good For The Blogosphere

by John Hawkins | December 22, 2005 3:06 pm

Back on June 16, 2004 I wrote a post talking about how people like Wonkette and Michelle Malkin were good for the blogosphere Here’s a little snippet[1]:

“…(I)t’s fantastic that people like Ana Marie Cox at Wonkette are growing so big, so fast, with the help of contacts and mainstream media publicity. The more readers Ana Marie gets, the more people who are being introduced to the world of blogging for the first time.

The same goes for people like Michelle Malkin who are just getting into blogging. Malkin’s blog has been up a week and she’s already pulling more than 2300 visitors a day. Some people might hear about that and go “That stinks! I’ve been blogging for a year and I have 300 readers and some famous columnist walks in and cracks 2000 sets of eyeballs just like that. It’s not fair!” Forget about “fair,” people like Michelle Malkin are good for blogging. They not only make the rest of us more credible by their very presence, they introduce lots of new readers from their newspaper columns, books, & TV appearances to the blogosphere.”

Did I turn out to be right? Well, at least from my own perspective — oh yeah! This year, Michelle Malkin[2] has sent RWN more than 85,700 impressions and Wonkette[3] chipped in another 4,000 or so. That means this year, RWN was sent an extra 90,000 sets of eyeballs because of two blogs that didn’t even exist two years ago.

So what’s the lesson here? It’s that it’s almost Christmas time, the blogosphere is really slow, and I’m trying to introduce a little filler before I start my vacation….wait, wait, that’s not it. Actually, the lesson here is that you shouldn’t get jealous of the success of other bloggers because their success has the potential to help make your blog more successful in the long run.