What the Kos Numbers Show

The domination of traffic by the Daily Kos shows the truth of the Internet Thesis.

The IN in the word Internet — it stands for Intimate.

No Web site has succeeded in scaling intimacy as well as DailyKos. Not Facebook. Not MySpace. Those sites offer people the chance to build monuments to themselves, to flit about like fish in the ocean and form schools. That’s not intimacy.

Intimacy means real, individual, one-to-one and one-to-several interaction. It means serious discussion on a serious level. It means getting soul-to-soul with people, and with the subject under discussion.

This is a business story, people. It’s not a political story. Kos simply has better tools than any similar site on the planet, and the best news is they’re getting better.

Contrast what Kos is doing, on a purely business level, with the star-filled Huffington Post. While HuffPost claims twice as many unique visitors, Kos gets twice the engagement from its audience — twice the page views and twice the time per visit.

All that with no stars, no big media buzz, with very, very little cost. (Oh, Kos says he’s presently on paternity leave — notice any weakness in the site’s operations? Neither do I.)

Which business would you rather own?

Add to that Kos’ YearlyKos event — the first convention on behalf of a blog is growing like Internet World did a decade ago.

Now which business would you rather own?

One more important point. How many other careers have HuffPost — or any other blog sites — created?

Well, Kos has created a bunch. Not just writers, but technicians, and people who understand the nature of the business and the technical creativity needed to succeed in it.

Here’s an example. Michael Lazzaro, alias Hunter. He’s the site’s head geek. He’s also a good writer. At most sites he’d be encouraged to find his own blog to post at, preferably somewhere else. If he weren’t already a celebrity, he wouldn’t get a sniff at the HuffPost. At DailyKos he earns his spurs every day.

Again, this is a business case study. When people come to them, you grow them, you keep their loyalty and you grow their skill set.

Now which business would you rather own?

I thought so.