Despite a long decline, the Alexa rankings for Daily Kos appear to be stabilizing. Some people think that means the site is recovering from its nearly two year long decay in viewership and relevancy, but here is why the "recovery" is overblown.
The most basic reason that Kos supporters should not get excited about this is that this is getting to the time of year when there should really be an uptick in users visiting the site, not a flat line. The midterm elections are approaching in only about four more months. Now is when people are tuning in to find out about primary elections, and what candidates are issues will be relevant in November. If even that added interest is only barely able to maintain their site, there is going to be a collapse in Alexa ratings after about the second week of November.
As the graph above clearly shows, this short stabilization is really just a blip of a few weeks over the course of the past year. It may not even last until the end of the month anyway.
Another issue for Daily Kos is that it has been steadily getting less traffic from search engines. This is crucial because this is how brand new users would find the site - if they were finding it. The site has very little potential to grow as this number continues to fall. Basically it is just either 1. old users going directly to the site, or 2. other sites linking to Kos. Not the type of natural growth a healthy site should have. Notice how significant a drop this is from even a year ago.
Ultimately, the leadership of Daily Kos is changing nothing about their behavior, and so it is inevitable that their fall from grace will continue. As the old saying goes "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results". Kos hasn't changed.
Note: This account is called "dailykos", but this article refers to the actual Daily Kos website. This account is called "dailykos" because I am a critic of Daily Kos and noticed they were not smart enough to ever claim that username on this site.
