After ranking the biggest right-of-center political websites, I thought it might be interesting to see which left-of-center websites receive the most traffic. So, I went to Alexa and ranked the 50 sites on the left. Do keep in mind that…
1) Alexa doesn’t distinguish between top level domains and their sub-directories. So, for example, a blog on Townhall and Townhall itself would have the same rating. Additionally, websites hosted at places like Blogspot, which list each blog on a sub-directory, can’t be measured. That knocked MSNBC, ABC, and NBC off the list.
2) I also decided to leave newspapers off the list for two reasons. Number one, there are obviously a lot of people reading newspapers for reasons other than political content, so it’s not completely fair to compare a newspaper to let’s say, the Daily Kos, which draws all its readers for political reasons. Number two, since most newspapers lean to the left and a lot of newspapers have large, local readerships, had I included the papers, they would have dominated the list. I’m going to estimate 40 out of the top 50 spot, perhaps more, would have been taken up by newspapers.
3) Although I have found Alexa to be generally accurate, it does occasionally make mistakes and certainly isn’t as on target as a statistics tracker.
4) I didn’t deliberately leave any left-of-center websites off the list other than the ones mentioned. So, if you are supposed to be on the list and weren’t included, feel free to send me an email.
All 50 websites are listed with their Alexa rank following their link. So for example, a “1” would mean the page was the most popular website on the net. A “100,000” would mean the 100,000th most popular page on the net. With that being said, let’s go ahead and take a look at the rankings.