Nick Confessore asks

Does anyone have good information on audience growth for the top political blogs? Are they still going up, or reaching a peak?

Why don't we take a look at their own stats? Here's the last year for Daily Kos and for Atrios.

The overall trend is pretty clearly upward, though of course a plateau could be reached at any time. Personally, I'd expect more increases between now and November, and some dropoff (hard to say how much) after the election is over.

For what it's worth, even much smaller blogs have had success at fundraising. I refer you to Angry Bear, who claims over $5000 raised for Kerry, and Roman Candles, which has raised $600.

Of course, there's also our group labor of love known as Texas Tuesdays, which has been beating the drums for various candidates since early May. I can't tell you how much we've raised - we haven't kept track of it - but I know we're getting the word out and raising awareness if nothing else.

I think one of the keys to blog fundraising is that it allows an interested audience to heare about races that may interest them which they wouldn't know about otherwise. The dKos 8 has very successfully capitalized on this. Thanks to gerrymandering, there's a lot of people like me who are in uncompetitive and uncontested Congressional districts. Thanks to blogs, there's a place for us to go to find candidates we like who can use our help. When you think about it, the blogs serve as a distribution system that allows a nominally local product to find a national market. It's no surprise to me that it's been successul, and I think it will continue to be, especially if the Democrats are smart enough to grow the audience.

The one thing I wonder about is what will happen in the lag time between this November and the 2006 election season. Will more formal structures and networks arise to build on the already-established fundraising abilities of blogs? Will McCain/Feingold be extended to regulate online fundraising? Will BlogAds be able to maintain itself without a hot market for political ads? It'll be interesting to watch.