Is This Blaze Story Likely to be Shared on Social Media? This Chart Says Yes

Political campaigns and traditional media outlets have only recently come to grips with the fact that social media has become a major player in our nation's politics. Indeed, thanks to platforms like Twitter and Facebook, major political stories are more likely to break on social media and go "viral" well before newspapers or TV networks even know what's happening.

But wouldn’t it be interesting see which outlets lead in spreading political news through social media? Wouldn’t be interesting to see the types of stories that get shared by readers on both the left and right side of the political spectrum?

If you answered yes, then you’re in luck.

“Newswhip, which tracks content on Facebook and Twitter, has sampled a week's worth of news from the ‘leading left- and right-wing news sources’ it tracks using its Spike system to get a sense of what sharing looks like for partisan publications,” writes BuzzFeed’s Matt Buchanan.

You know what they found?

“Glenn Beck's startup TheBlaze has quickly surpassed its conservative competitors by many measures of sharing, even as it holds a lower profile in the elite conversation,” Buchanan notes.

Boom.

And you better believe TheBlaze is stepping it up. In fact, according to Google Analytics, TheBlaze enjoyed 110 million page views and 14 million “unique” visitors in October (so thank you for that).

As the following chart clearly illustrates, among the limited number of “left- and right-wing news sources" Newship tracked, TheBlaze, though young, is making a name for itself:

A word on the chart [via BuzzFeed]:

The data from Newswhip's sources, which range from the progressive magazine Mother Jones to Fox News — though Newship says it "deliberately excluded plenty of 'mainstream media sources' that people on either side might consider to be biased," so there are limits to what it's looking at — offer a complex picture of what goes viral: Some of it is affirmation or good news for partisans, like Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama was for Democrats; some is the mirror image of that — stories casting your foe in a bad light, like a Fox News report accusing President Obama of abandoning Americans in Benghazi.

And while the inclusion of online media giant Huffington Post skews the numbers for biggest social reach, the key figure may be in the middle, the most interactions per story, owned by Maddow Blog on the left and The Blaze on the right.

Follow Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) on Twitter