My little pop-up WordPress blog with noted foodie Jill Moorhead seems to be going pretty well. Jill is just now returning from a long business trip so the balance of food-to-cars stories should tilt back to equilibrium shortly. While she was gone, however, she managed to score a bit of a blogosphere coup.
Those of us who write for car blogs don’t like to think about it, but we are a very small niche in a much bigger universe of websites. Here’s an example: According to Alexa, the well-known site-traffic monitor company, this is how the following websites rank in terms of global and Stateside traffic:
* Autoblog: #1,690 global / #628 in the US
* Jalopnik.com: #1,196 global / #337 in the US
* Caranddriver.com: #2,537 global / #878 in the US
* Motortrend.com: #5,496 global / #1,772 in the US
* Roadandtrack.com: #9,146 global / #3,368 in the US
* The Truth About Guns: #17,036/#4,017
* Autoweek: #22,117/#6,325
* TTAC: #29,009/#7,497
* EVO: #48,183/#3,168 (UK)
* Curbside Classics: #163,052/#43,924
* Jackbaruth.com: #1,766,642/#417,079 (WOO HOO HALF TOP MILLION BABY!)
Clearly, Jalopnik leads the field here, although a lot of that is due to the way their website is entangled with Gawker (#480/#132!) and Jezebel (#899/#263).
Above all these car blogs, however, you’ll find general-interest content, pornography, celebrity culture, and hobbies that are more universal than ours. A good example of that is thekitchn.com, which sits about even with Jalopnik in the US at #338 but has more global power: it’s a Top 1000 website globally at #961. Should you stroll over to said side, you’ll find a popular debut piece by The Grocery Insider. It’s our very own Jill!
This is a big deal for her and I know she’s going to be the famous half of our little duo in very short order.
Given the number of questions I’ve gotten about Jill via e-mail in the past month or so, I might as well do a quick FAQ right now?
Q: Is Jill single? This is the most popular question by far. No, she is not.
Q: Does that mean the two of you are dating? No, she got a man, yo, a fellow whom I count among my closest friends.
Q: Does that mean you are single? It does not.
Q: Could you pass along this photograph to Jill? It’s of my dick. Sorry, I can’t do nothing for you, man.
Q: Will you review [NAME OF RESTAURANT]? Yes, as soon as we can get to it. Thank you for the suggestion.
Q: How serious is her relationship? Can I use the techniques that I have learned from reading your blog to tap that ass? Sir, you should be ashamed of yourself, and you know I’m talking directly to you.
Go check Jill out, but when you’re done, don’t forget about your friends here. WE’RE NUMBER 417,079!
I love your site and your writing. You’ll be in the third top million before you know it. As someone that enjoys reading about guns and cars (and watches and cameras), I’m a little surprised TTAG is ranked that much higher than TTAC.
There are fewer gun sites out there and Robert has been on the forefront of political activism in the field, I think.
Robert has a newsman’s nose for controversy.
Talking about TTAG, will you writing more for them anytime soon?
^be
I don’t give a rat’s ass about any of those other sites but I can rest assured that your writing about most anything will bring a smile to my face Jack .
Don’t change even though I think you look like a bum & need a hair cut .
Do what it is that makes you , you .
-Nate
(grumpy old geezer who likes to yell at the kids)
It is a little surprising to me how badly Jalopnik dwarfs TTAC, both becuase their content is shitty and I thought TTAC was a bigger deal. I wonder what the other 7154 sites between them cover.
that’s one benefit of being in with Gawker, as they very heavily cross-promote content across all of their affiliated sites.
the downside is that sometimes you’ll go to Jalopnik to read about a brown, diesel, manual trans station wagon and someone will have cross promoted an article about a “cis-gender-queer vegan former prostitute” from Jezebel.
I would also offer that a some of Jalopniks/Jezebel/Gawker’s contributors have a stunning work ethic. Which surprises me. I was just teamed with Jalopniks Stef Schrader for the “LeMons Race that Wasn’t” at ECR.
From wake-up until late in the evening, when she wasn’t teching safety gear, her nose was always in her laptop generating content. Granted, that is the nature of her job, but I was sincerely impressed and humbled. So even if there’s just a few more like her in that organization, the sheer volume of content that they are going to generate is going to bring in a lot of views.
Stef is pretty non-representative of Gawker writers in pretty much all respects, for what it’s worth.
My favorite blog does have some vehicles featured in the background sometimes so it is somewhat auto related. It is “World War II Today”, a historical entry for every single day from 1939 to 1945, but be careful it is a rabbit hole you can lose many hours of your life to.
http://ww2today.com/category/1939