CINCINNATI (TDB) -- The green line on the chart is for DailyKos. Cleveland.com (Plain Dealer) is blue; Cincinnati.com (Cincinnati Enquirer) is orange; Ohio.com (Akron Beacon Journal) is red. The data is from Google Trends, which analyzes and estimates Web searches by topic. The programming is still being perfected, but Google says the data can be "interesting and entertaining" if not quite completely nailed down. Here's what Google says:"Google Trends is a Google Labs product, which means it's still in its early stages of development. The data Trends produces may contain inaccuracies for a number of reasons, including data-sampling issues and a variety of approximations that are used to compute results. We hope you find this service interesting and entertaining, but you probably wouldn't want to write your Ph.D. dissertation based on the information provided by Trends."
There is more about Google Trends here. The Cleveland.com Website had a significant uptick in February and March -- according to this data -- when the Ohio presidential primary loomed large on the national political calendar. From then 'til now, the trendlines for all the Ohio sites have been descending slowly, which doesn't bode well for the newspapers' efforts to morph from print to online. Of course, Google's data could be off. But it seems as if you are a one or two person blog getting 500 to 1,000 visits a day, you are doing pretty well compared to the big newpaper portals. In mid-June, the data shows the Cincinnati.com site was getting around 25,000 daily unique visitors. And that's with a large staff, access to the wire services, along with advertising and branding campaigns, a corporate marketing effort, a sales force and promotions online.
