A few days after the re-launch of Breitbart.com we saw an interesting article written by one of our most vitriolic critics, Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs. To be fair, we didn’t see it on his site because, like most human beings on planet earth, we just don’t read it. But we did see a few tweets go by on Twitter from the usual suspects linking back to Johnson’s article proclaiming that the re-design was “one of the biggest Internet failures ever!’
Now that certainly piqued our interest. What was the problem? Did Johnson not like our new color-scheme? Does he have an issue with the new comment section being too hard for his trolls to infiltrate? It turns out, not surprisingly, Johnson and his once readable website were claiming that Andrew’s hand-picked team had ruined his site by re-directing traffic to our main URL and thus killing all of our traffic.
As evidence of our failed strategy, he provided his 17 readers with a graph to show how our traffic had tanked. According to the expert on Internet traffic (HA! more on that in a moment) Johnson proclaimed: “Alexa’s statistics are not the most accurate, but their graph of biggovernment.com’s traffic shows what happens when you totally screw up all incoming links to old articles.”
Now, let’s think this through for a minute… our traffic is in the toilet because we have re-directed all traffic from the “Bigs” to our main URL as evidenced by a graph showing little or no traffic going to BigGovernment.com. But, if we have re-directed that traffic, doesn’t it mean it went somewhere else?
Take a look at what Johnson either wouldn’t show his 17 readers, or couldn’t quite get his tired old brain to figure out. Here is a graph from the very same Alexa showing traffic at Breitbart.com over the past month:
A quick word about the graph you are looking at. Alexa measures page views not in raw numbers, but in “percentage of global page views.” Looking at the Internet and all of the pages viewed per day globally, .003% is a huge number. By comparison, the most trafficked website, Google.com, registers around 5%. The three American networks, CBS.com, ABC.com and NBC.com all hover around the .004% range. Go to Alexa yourself and take a look.
You can see that the traffic in February was respectable and then spiked on March 1, the day of the tragic death of our founder. Then on March 5 you see the re-design take hold. We are happy to report that our traffic has been, well, terrific since the re-design and has consistently stayed healthy. In contrast, take a look at the very bottom of the Alexa graph. You might barely make out a little, squiggly red line under our triumphant blue line. That red line shows the traffic statistics for Johnson’s Little Green Footballs site. It barely registers on a graph comparing page view traffic to Breitbart.com.
So yes, Johnson assures his readers that “Breitbart Brain Trust Completely Destroys Own Websites” and shows erroneous and irrelevant traffic graphs to prove his false premise. Meanwhile, according to the same traffic analysis, he doesn’t really have a website to destroy.
It has been a little over two and a half weeks since the radical re-design and re-launch of Breitbart.com and our late founders’ beloved “Big” sites. As you can well imagine, it’s been pretty busy here at Breitbart’s secret lair and it has been nearly impossible to respond to all of the amazing feedback we’ve gotten from our loyal readers, and we thank you for it. We’ve taken all of your compliments and criticisms to heart, and we are continuing to work on the design, functionality and inner-workings of the site. As Andrew said one week before the re-launch: “A website is never completed, our launch date is the beginning of our work, not the end.”
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