A year ago today, I predicted that Luke Hellier would continue to kill Minnesota Democrats Exposed with his marginal writing.
Bet: Minnesota Democrats Exposed will have less traffic a year from now if Luke Hellier remains the sole author, as measured by Compete.com
How did I do?
Well, it turned out that Luke bailed on the MDE writing gig before the year was up, handing it Andy Post and Ryan Lyk. With that said, the site’s traffic did indeed decline year over year by 19% according to Compete.com:
Does this mean that Andy Post and Ryan Lyk combined add up to one Luke Hellier? That may be giving Lyk too much credit since he seems to have quit contributing to the site after penning a whopping 14 posts.
Perhaps a combination of Lyk’s failure to execute together with Post’s failure at executing carried the torch downhill for Hellier?
Ryan Lyk was only supposed to be there temporarily and MDE actually announced his official departure after his election to a new position. You need to leave him out of this. He isn’t even listed on their site as an author anymore.
http://www.minnesotademocratsexposed.com/disclosure-page-about-mde/
@John, you made two statements without backing them up:
1. Suggesting that Ryan’s position was temporary. Have a link to support that? It sure didn’t sound that way when he joined the site.
2. That MDE announced his departure. Perhaps I missed it, but when I look up mentions of Ryan Lyk on MDE for all of 2011, I see four of them, and they are all for posts Ryan wrote. It sure looks like he quietly disappeared from the site in January and didn’t get elected to his new position until April. If any of my objective statements are not accurate, hook me up with some links documenting my errors.
Also, do you have any idea why Lyk didn’t earn a by-line as a previous author on the disclosures page?
And, of course, why do I “need to leave him out of this”?
I agree the site sucks even worse than it used to, but it does seem disingenuous to compare 2010, a year in which there was a general election, to 2011. My guess would be that a political website’s traffic rises and falls with the political cycle. What happens if you compare 2009 to 2011?
Barry makes sense. The graph shows a marked decrease after the 2010 election. If a person is normal, they do get tired of following the political horserace after a certain point.
Barry, that’s a good point. It was definitely a consideration that worked in my favor.
July was actually a decent month for MDE, by Compete.com’s measures:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/minnesotademocratsexposed.com/
Perhaps our local politician’s interests in being president played a role?