This just warmed my heart today while reading the Drudge Report:
'PROGRESSIVE' MEDIA STALLS: 'AIR AMERICA' IN AUDIENCE PLUNGE NYC, 'DAILY KOS' BOOK SELLS ONLY 3,600 COPIES Wed Apr 26 2006 11:39:51 ETLeft-leaning new media has hit turbulence at the marketplace, newly released stats show.
A book hyped by major media as documenting a progressive revolution of "blogs" and political power, DAILY KOS 'CRASHING THE GATE,' has sold only 3,630 copies since its release last month, according to NIELSEN's BOOKSCAN.
[NIELSEN claims only 2,062 copies of DAILY KOS have been purchased at the retail level; the rest coming through 'discount' outlets. The NIELSEN figures do include online sales from AMAZON.COM, and others.]
Meanwhile, the just released radio Winter Book [Jan-Mar 2006] from ARBITRON shows AIR AMERICA in New York City losing more than a third of its audience -- in the past year!
Among all listeners 12+, it was a race to the bottom for AIR AMERICA and WLIB as mid-days went from a 1.6 share during winter 2005 to a 1.0 share winter 2006.
During PM drive, host Randi Rhodes plunged to 27,900 listeners every quarter hour, finishing 25th place in her time slot, down from 60,900 listeners every quarter hour in the fall.
A network source says the radio ratings released today do not reflect the overall growth of the broadcast.
"The demos are better, and listeners trust AIR AMERICA to give them the real truth on issues and the Bush presidency," says the insider.
Developing...
Daily Kos is disputing the numbers, however:
Bookscan just surveys a sampling of big box retailers, so it's not a complete market analysis. Merely a snapshot of major retailers (and not even all of them). And it absolutely fails to capture online sales.So let's see. The book has been out three weeks. It has sold 5,100 copies of the special edition and 3,630 according to Drudge (if he can be trusted) in a sampling of the big box bookstores.
That's 8,730 right there. Now throw in the indy bookstores (we've probably sold close to 1,000 just in the book signing events I've attended), and we're getting close to 10,000.
I'm sorry, but 10,000 isn't a heck of a lot of books, plain and simple! It doesn't matter if Bookscan only queries major retailers--a lot of people still buy their books that way! The Kos website gets far more hits than the number of books they've sold. They can complain about the numbers all they want and say that Drudge is misrepresenting them, but the fact remains that they're not moving a lot of units. I don't care how it's ranked on Amazon.com, the fact is they admit to 10,000 units or less and that's not a lot of books.
Let's also consider the other half of this story with the declining ratings for Air America radio. Is this really surprising? Conservative radio succeeds because the message and the content resonates with the people listening. In short, it gets ratings. Liberal radio doesn't have the drawing power because people don't want to hear the message. People are inundated with Liberalism in the rest of the Media Spin Machine, and that's why Conservative Radio succeeds.
The problem is just like I said during election season: the problem isn't that people aren't getting the message. The problem is the message sucks and people don't want to hear it.
William Smith
ConservativeBlogger.com
