How Much Bigger Is Ours Than Yours?

By FITSNews || It’s been awhile since we engaged in a sophomoric tit-for-tat with one of the “readership-challenged” bottom feeders of the S.C. political blogosphere, because to be perfectly honest we’ve evolved past that sort of thing (note the humility, people).

Plus, according to our founding editor, an intramural spitball fight between two blogs doesn’t constitute “news,” and all it ever ends up doing is giving free publicity to our “competitors” (such as they are).

“I’m in the business of giving love to myself, not somebody else,” Sic says.

Hmmm … try not visualize that.

Of course when we get “snippygrams” from people challenging our reporting (like the one that writer Eric Ward of The Nerve sent us today) we do feel the need to respond.

From Ward’s message to us:

Wanted to share the attached Google analytics with you so that you can accurately report our unique visitors in the future should you choose to.

You’ll see that we had 4,800 unique visitors in March – our second month of being live, and four times the 1,200 you reported in your post on Friday.

Ward then provided us with the following attachment documenting The Nerve‘s “prowess …”

Alright … so the site got 10,800 visits (4,800 of them “unique”) and 52,000 page views in March, according to Google. Which would obviously represent a decent-sized increase over the February stats we cited last week from another source (different month + different source = different stats, people).

So … how do these new Nerve numbers compare “apples to apples” to FITS?

Let’s take a look from FITS own Google analytics page …

As you can see, over the same time period, FITS received 210,387 visits (87,700 of them unique) and over 705,000 page views.  And in addition to being much, much (much) bigger, we also “know how to use it,” if you catch our drift.

But S.C. Policy Council President Ashley Landess knows all about that …

Anyway, The Nerve is indeed young (in its third month) – but it’s also starting with some huge six-figure grants from well-heeled donors (groups that we’re told include the Koch foundation folks).  Seriously, how else do you think they can afford the overhead that goes with having such a huge staff?

We obviously supported the launch of the Nerve (and have even linked to some of their stories in the past) because at the end of the day we don’t fear competition – we embrace it.

Sometimes literally.

This is the marketplace of ideas, people.  May the best site win!