Sneaky quick: a by the numbers look at how VoteVets is quietly cornering the market on the milblogosphere.

UPDATE: THIS POST NOW FEATURES MORE COWBELL!
[We NEED your help people. Either come up with advice for us here, or we will have to hire an expert to look at the numbers and correct this creeping malaise.]

Look, everyone knows that I hate VoteVets, and that I think dicksmith is a no-talent assclown. But, I am man enough to admit that they really are quite a success story, and I don’t just mean their over 9 percent success rate in the most recent election, but rather their ability to draft up posts and get huge numbers to comment. Jonn became very concerned about this a little over a week ago, and tasked me with finding out why we were hemorrhaging readers while VoteVets was growing faster than Michael Moore at an all you can eat buffet.

My first step in approaching this situation was to start with a control period of time in which to conduct my research. I decided to arbitrarily begin with November 9th as my start date. It was a great day for VoteVets, who did a story on the missile launch, and got a comment from frequent commenter “dememe”. (This is their third most prolific commenter, tied with a spam for Uggs boots and another spam commenter for “Cheshire Wedding Photography” for 1 comment each.) This day concerned me greatly, as our post on the subject by Old Tanker only brought in 2700 percent more comments. I knew then we were in trouble.

Anyway, I looked first at VoteVets commenters, and found the following information about their commenter demographics which I put into a helpful graph form:

As you can see, in the 9 days of my study, VetVoice.com got 22 comments, which is pushing 2 1/2 comments a day. That is an astronimical number, possibly attributable to the fact that Veterans Day fell in there, and the head of VoteVets, MOH recipient Motor Pool guy Jon Soltz appeared on national TV on the 534th most watched program, Keith Olbermann. (It should be noted that Olbermann’s show “Countdown” may pass “When Chinchillas attack” from Animal Planet this week to take the 533rd position.) Of those comments, 14 were Jim Staro (who we have profiled in the past) 2 were the spam, and 6 others were other folks, like DeMeme.

What concerns me is the prolific nature of the commenters, and the vast numbers of those prolific writters. Each of them (and there are 8 if you count the spam as seperate) are writing at a clip of almost 3 comments each over 8 days.

By way of contrast, This Ain’t Hell during that same period only had 607 comments. Put again in graph form, it looks like this:

Now, if I know dicksmith, and I truly hope I don’t, he is no doubt standing on his Barbie play station desk right now giving a speech to his troops, quoting Chesty Puller:

“So they’ve got us surrounded, good! Now we can fire in any direction, those bastards won’t get away this time!”

It’s pretty obvious from even a cursory look at that graph that TAH is in peril of floundering like Guam during fleet week. So help us. Help us to help you. We don’t have the millions of dollars that VoteVets has, we don’t have the cult of personality that is Jim Staro, dicksmith, Tony “My name is sealed bitch” Camerino and the rest of them.

So, what can we do to fix this problem? Please comment.

For JAG:

For Spade.

In the comments Spade states:

This post needs more charts. Like ‘comments over time’ and stuff.

This is exactly the kind of comment that scared the brown into my boxers. Just reading it I started shaking and had to go take a Crying Game Shower because it just illustrates the precariousness of our position. These guys at VV are nipping at our heals, and no graph could make that as clear as this one.

Look at the surge of November 15 in particular. Now, just stop and ponder what might have happened if this tsunami of comments been on an magnitude of scale 800 percent over what it was….they would have had 72 comments to our measly 66. We are on trecherous ground my friends, and we must right this ship ASAP.

Category: Politics