Benchmarking the influence of a blog

Another interesting example of how influence has developed over time comes from looking at the blog of Iain Dale. Mr. Dale is a prominent political commentator whose blog has gained quite a following.

The graph below shows the influence of Mr. Dale’s blog when the topic is “David Cameron”. The baseline is again the influence of the BBC (same context).

We can see that the Influence of Mr. Dale’s blog in February was roughly 8% of that of the BBC.Since then his relative influence (compared with the BBC’s) has grown steadily – until the end of June. Here it took a bit of drop.

However, it is likely that the drop was attributable to a surge in the general influence of the BBC on the topic of David Cameron.

Using the contextual influence of The Guardian as a baseline for Mr. Dale’s blog reveals that he is still doing well. (See below).Benchmarking influence aside it is actually interesting to see how much influence a blog can carry on a major topic. Mr. Dale’s influence on the debate on David Cameron currently stands at about 15% of that of the BBC and just under 60% of that of The Guardian.