Readership figures for political blogs are secret – especially the further you go into the furthest flung corners of the blogosphere. In fact, apart from the very top bloggers, everyone else is mostly silent about their readership figures.

That’s because the fall-off in readership from the top 2 blogs to even the 5th most popular blog is huge. It’s ‘distribution of wealth around the world’ types of curves, and that makes Guido & Iain the sort of Bill and Melissa Gates of blogging.

It seems barely credible to talk about a political blogging phenomenon so much as Iain Dale and Paul Staines just happen to run very successful websites that just happen to be blogs that just happen to be in a genre that’s normally very, very niche.

Let’s get some numbers out there to put things in perspective:

Guido got 300,000 absolute unique visitors this month (let’s call this ’100%’ of the political blog readership.) That’s with the help of television and the press and being a huge story himself.

Lib Dem Voice, the top Liberal Democrat blog, got 30,000 absolute unique visitors (10% of Guido’s readership) this month, and this is the biggest Lib Dem blog.  That’s already a huge drop off. According to Wikio, Lib Dem Voice is the 6th most influential political blog.

This first month for charlottegore.com…. deep breath…. I got 4,250 absolute unique visitors (a teeny bit over 1.41% of Guido’s readership, or over 14.1% of the Lib Dem Voice’s readership). Those 4,250 visited 22,182 times between them. Hardcore!

I have no idea how this compares to other lib dem bloggers – I suspect that if you were to line us all up in terms of traffic I’d be in the top 10, I believe – but I’d be extremely worried about the state of the Lib Dem blogosphere as a whole if I was in the top 5.

What does all this mean though? What does it say about this ‘industry’ of political blogging. I think it means the vast majority of people reading political blogs are only reading one or two political blogs – Iain and/or Guido – the names mentioned on television and the newspapers. The further away from these two blogs people are: (one click? two clicks? three clicks? six clicks?) The number of readers drops off sharply with every click, requiring individuals to be a lot more determined to find and seek out interesting content.

This is why I don’t get, “ughhhg!! LUBDUMBS R stp00p1d LOLZZZLL!!!111″ type comments. Long may that continue.

So I think all in all I’m doing better than I probably should be (even if I’m probably not doing as well as people imagined), and that the people who visit this blog are as tenacious, stubborn and obsessed by politics as I am. Probably not as obsessed about the minutea of the blogosphere itself though… I really should ban myself from these ‘shop talk’ posts.