HuffPost bloggers not so widely read

The Huffington Post website as a whole gets huge viewership, about 15.6 million pageviews on a weekday. But NYT statistical guru Nate Silver, in making a case that L.A. Times columnist Tim Rutten misunderstands the HuffPost business model, calculates that the "free" blog posts by volunteer contributors are barely seen at all in comparison. The traffic at the Huffington Post is highly fractured — only about 15% of pageviews are in the politics section, for example. And by far the most eyeballs go to the news posts aggregated from other websites or written by HuffPost reporters, Silver says. Celebrity tabloid photos and nipple slips have to account for a bunch too. The blog posts from politicians and pundits selling something, from Arianna's friends and from people who want the cachet of seeing their words on the HuffPost get the leftovers, and Silver surmises it isn't much. (He estimates that just four percent of politics pageviews come from blog posts.) "I’d imagine there are occasional instances in which blog posts hit the jackpot and generate thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of page views," Silver writes. "For the most part, however, they do not move the needle very much."