Politico.com: 85 staff members, 3 million unique readers per month.
Talkingpointsmemo.com: 12 staff members, 2.5 milliion unique readers per month.
Just sayin’.
Update: Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei says their internal numbers are much higher than 3 million. My point still stands (unless it’s 6X the 3 mill), but I thought it was fair to point that out.
Interesting. But can you please supplement with some figure estimating the contribution of each to knowledge of politics and policy? I.e., # stories broken.
Would you dispute TPM is freeloading off of at least some of Politico’s reporters?
Freeloading? In the sense of linking to their stories and sending them traffic and uniques?
I would be willing to bet a lot of money we send them more traffic (since we have an aggregating homepage that sends traffic out) than they send us.
So, you are sending them traffic by being a great aggregator. But they are providing content that allows you to aggregate. I realize that TPM produces original content, too, but wouldn’t the ideal model would have more than 12 staff members covering American politics and policy?
Well, yes, which is why we hire more people all the time. But I think you’re approaching this from an old media perspective and not understanding the way the web works.
The ecosystem of web traffic is about serving an audience by doing a mix of intelligent aggregation (only a small number of Politico stories/day are actually interesting to our readers) and original reporting (pushing stories that your readers will care about).
That’s why, as I noted yesterday, the NYTs and others are starting to leave their old media model behind and link to other content from their front page.
The idea is, as Jeff Jarvis said, “do what you do best and link to the rest.”
Yes. I agree about the new ecosystem must work, and does work, via a mix of aggregation and original reporting. And I am very very glad that you guys are hiring all the time.
I think where we differ is on the characteristics of the online ecosystem. I agree that what we have is a system in which various sites build off of each other’s assets to create, ideally, greater wholes. I just don’t know whether that is a sustainable model in the long run.
Let’s say there is a number X of reporters we need in the world in order to produce an adequate amount of truth-telling, accountability, and transparency.
Option A is that this internet ecosystem can sustain that X level of reporters, even after all the old-media layoffs. After an initial dip in reporters, the number will rise as new-media organizations like TPM hire more people and old-media ones reorganize themselves inside the new economy, getting rid of their print editions and replacing those funds with new reporters. A surge of Y unpaid community participants in the conversation (CNN’s i-reporters, TPM’s staff of reader-investigators) could also offset the losses. Maybe they would even tip the number of effective “reporters” above X.
But I also can imagine an Option B. This looks less like a happy mutually productive ecosystem and more like the current American economy, in which a few giants leech off the rest of us for an unsustainable outcome. In this option, after all the layoffs in the print media, the reporting workforce X is never recovered. The newspapers do not make profitable web sites, and they are not replaced by start-ups that figure out how to do that for them. Internet advertising never becomes profitable, and all we are left with is a Google — but no content to search from.