Smitty, you qualified as an Ace when you shot down your fiftieth webidiot by calling a spade a spade.

Umm, the scale on the graph is inverted, and thus the graph indicates that Sullivan's traffic is steadily INCREASING.

Clark,

I wondered about that. Are you certain? Are you sure the scale isn't one where a lower number is better, like "rank among sites" or golf?

It seems strange to ol' Smitty to have a chart where higher means less, but that's just the way it seems to Smitty.

Where did the graph come from? IS there any explanation of the y-axis?

I got the graph from this page...

...Here.

There's a "what's this" thing to explain it, but it doesn't mention that the axis is inverted.

The graph represent his average daily rank... therefore, the smaller the number on the Y axis, the higher the daily rank... all his traffic numbers are trending downward....

Thanks for tellin' ol' Smitty. Smitty hates being wrong about Andrew Sullivan.

But I still don't know.

I don't understand how they get those numbers. It seems unlikely to me that AS could possibly be in the 10-20,000dth range of anyone's ranking system.

I doubt he'd fall out of the top 50, even with declining traffic, and even with ol' Smitty all up his nose about everything.

Jus' the way it seems to Smitty.

Is this "refer to yourself in the third person" day for Smitty?

Sorry, uh, Smitty, but this switcheroo of the ol' nom de blog is positively Seinfeldian.

But if this is what Smitty wants, then, by golly, I'm with Smitty. If this makes Smitty sleep better at night then color me Smitty-tized. Y'know, I think I can grok Smitty, if that doesn't sound gay or anything.

(This isn't some weird set-up before you throw your vote to Kerry is it?)

Just trying to establish the name.

Look, some jokes are just for ol' Smitty.

You guys might be annoyed, but every time I write "Smitty," I giggle.

And no, Smitty isn't moving towards the Kerry camp. You don't have to worry about ol' Smitty on that score.

And if you're hating this "Smitty" thing, take heart:

This is a 24 hour sort of joke.

OK, Smitty. But the third-person-no-personal- pronouns format can only mean one thing: Smitty's got a thing for Elaine. Oh, yeah. Smitty's new in town. Smitty's comfortable with his sexuality. Smitty's never been into that sexual stereotyping. Smitty's down! Smitty's going into shock!!

If "Ace of Spades" was a desperate loner with nothing left to lose (and that was all a lie) is "Smitty", in fact, a confident extrovert with nothing left to gain?

"Smit"

At truthlaidbear, Sully's at #3 for the last few days. His numbers are up and down, but #3 in the whole blogosphere is pretty good. Unfortunately.

Caveat: truthlaidbear only ranks according to inbound links, so traffic wise, Sully's indeed down. But I'd guess that most bloggers are down propoertionally when big events like the election and the executions happen---there's just more internet traffic.

What's the Smit-meister think?

Smitty thinks that links are a pretty poor indicator of traffic, since they tend to remain stable.

Methinks Smitty has been smitten by self love.

Wonder does AS support marriage between a man and himself? Constitutional right to Pursuit of Happiness after all. What is the basis for requiring two people, outdated ritualism?

Smitty (or is it Esther? Taking a page from the Material Girl?),

Being at least somewhat familiar with Alexa's rating system, let me clarify:

Alexa tracks the surfing habits of people who use the Alexa toolbar on their browser. It's not a definitive ranking system, but it does tend to identify overall increasing/decreasing trendlines pretty well..

The chart you posted shows a *significant* downturn in Sullivan's traffic.

Follow this link:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=medium&compare_sites=&url=andrewsullivan.com#top

This gives greater detail about Sully's fall...One highlight for you: Sullivan's average traffic level has dropped by 29% over the last 3 months alone....

How is Smitty HQ doing? Check it out for yourself:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=www.ace.mu.nu

Smitty - up 108% over 3 months!

ADVANTAGE: SMITTY!

That's got to call for a little Tawny Kitaen, doncha think?

Frenchie,

As Allah pointed out, it is possible for a man to have his head's gay marriage to his body seperated at knifepoint.

So, I suppose theoretically, "Smitty" could be engaged in a little "sekf love" gay marriage with his hand.

But then again, if I was a desperate loner with nothing left to lose, I might propose to my hands too. Just turn out the light and think of them as the Coors Lite twins.

Smitty...Ace.
Ace......Smitty.

hm.

Eh. Don't care either way as long as you keep writing like you do.

Hmm..Lauraw, we really have to stop meeting like this. Didn't i just bump post's with you over at the Deity's place?

Anyway, since Ace of Spades is now up for grabs (no self love pun intended), I'm gonna make a new blog called "Aces and Eights HQ".

First entry: a tribute to Paul Anka songs that include cowbell.

Second entry: Top ten things Andrew Sullivan would rather see in a Whitesnake video than Tawny Kitean.

Third Entry: A collection of the wit and wisdom of Al Franken and Margaret Cho.

Blogspot, here I come!

Oh, and Smitty...do you think I could get a link?

JimB,

Thanks, but there's good news and bad news about that graph. (I checked it myself earlier.)

That graph appears to show the traffic for all of the mu.nu sites, amalgamated together. If you look at the name given to my site, it's "ambient Irony," which is of course not the name of this site at all. Ambient Irony is the name of Pixy Misa's site; Pixy Misa is the head muckety-muck of mu.nu.

So my traffic is only a tiny fraction of the traffic shown there (around 2%, alas).

On the other hand, a three month graph of this site's growth would be asymptotic, because I haven't been at mu.nu for much more than three months.

And yeah, Andrew Sullivan gets a lot of things first, but here's one he didn't.

He recounts a harrowing Jihadist narrative in the post "The Fanatics We Face," attributing this newsflash to an Aussie reporter.

Well, the same material was printed on Smitty HQ, linking to AmericanDigest.org, who had it first (as far as I know).

"Note that December 26, 2004 was when Smitty HQ went live. Check out the steep decline begining on that very date."

Uh, Smitty? To hell with Sullivan, what I'd really like to see is a stock market graph for December 2004.

You should let Allah be "Smitty" after this stunt runs its course...

Kingslasher beat me to it, so I'll just jump on the pile:
In addition to a stock market graph, I'd like the NFL scores for the month of December 2004.

Ace said, "'Chuck'...confirms Madfish Willie's statement that the graph does show declining traffic."

The 29% decline Ace reports is for "reach," which is a ratio: visits per million Internet users. It's not a measure of traffic, unless by "the traffic on this road" we mean "cars on this road per million cars." Since it's a ratio, it can either indicate declining traffic or an increasing number of people using the Internet. In this case, it appears to indicate the latter.

Further down the page, Alexa shows "No Change" in page views over three months. That's one measure of traffic. Another measure, visit counts, is available at Sitemeter.

At andrewsullivan.com, scroll to the bottom of the page, click the Sitemeter icon, and look at the graphs of visits and page views. May's traffic was down from February's--and up from January's. The monthly traffic figure for June is necessarily incomplete, but we can already conclude that June's traffic is higher than January's.

All that remains is to see the quality and placement of Ace's correction or indeed if he will issue one. Sullivan means business with his corrections. He tends to give a correction the same prominent display that he gave the error and is usually very direct in acknowledging his mistake and the importance of getting things right. The New York Times's corrections are tiny, obscurely placed, and make the minimal acknowledgement. To be more like "Sully" or more like the New York Times: That shouldn't be a difficult choice.

Hey, Andrew, um, I mean "Doug," thanks for stopping by.

By the way: You rowback a lot of errors. I've caught you doing it and documented it here.

Wow - you went live in December of "2004?" Holy shit! Where'd you get the time machine, Smitty?

Come on. Give me a break. I'm still writing "2002" on my checks.

You're lucky I was even able to ballpark the year I started out.

But I'll fix that.

And Doug, I don't seriously think you're Sullivan; I'm just kidding.

But I do think you're interpreting the SiteMeter chart all wrong.

And you're also wrong about what Alexa tracks. You say it's reach. Well, it is reach, whatever that is, but it's reach PLUS actual traffic. They say so. Click on the button for an explanation and Alexa tells you the rating is a combination of reach and traffic.

It's incorrect to say it's only tracking "Reach" (again, I don't really know what the heck "reach" is).

I got tired of Sullivan when he became OBSESSED with the gay marriage thing. I'm a homo, & I find the whole subject a BORE, and, in the scope of things, not too terribly important when jihadists psychos want to kill u...

Ace,

You're right that February is the first full month available from Sitemeter. If I'm reading the graph correctly for February and May, then 1.47 million (May) divided by 1.68 million (Feb.) is .875, so Sullivan's visits in May are equal to 87.5% of his visits in February, for a decline of 12.5%. The uptick from April to May is 1.38%, i.e. ((1.47 / 1.45) - 1) * 100%, if I'm reading the graph correctly.

It appears June will come in at 1.5 million, if traffic continues at the rate it has so far. It's reasonable to think that visits will increase each month between now and the election in November, then fall off sharply as we all give it a rest afterwards.

Doug,

Let's get back to the point: You said the SiteMeter chart contradicted Alexa. You seem to concede now it does not.

So let's go back to the Alexa chart: It shows his traffic-ranking declining. That's my main point.

I'm just sayin' that I have single-handedly brought down Andrew Sullivan.

(Okay, I'm not really saying that.)

Compare Sullivan's traffic to Instapundit's. They are very similar.

graph

Okay, I guess you've just proven...

...that I've taken them both down.

Just kidding. I guess that shows that traffic among the big boys is down generally since February, although I can't figure out why February would be such a big news period.

Primaries, I guess. Howard Dean's "Yeaahh."

poker me up