Pundit Watch rests its case
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Over the past 4 months we’ve diligently tracked some of the nations most prominent pundits. Not everyone welcomed having the card marked but we continue to track them anyway. Our objective was to find out how accurate these pundits were and whether their accuracy (or lack of it) actually matter to readers.
The results to date show Nikki Finke in the lead as while she has only a 55% accuracy record she’s successfully predicted a number of rank outsiders giving her a healthy return. Celebrity blogger, Perez Hilton, isn’t far behind in third position overall but DListed trails badly with a 33% accuracy ratio.
In the world of politics David Brooks is top dog with an impressive 62.5% accuracy ratio but additionally a number of well picked outsiders. Pat Buchanan has achieved an impressive 80% success ratio however many of his punts were odds on favorites so he still only ranks in 6th position. Chris Mathews however is in the red with a 41.67% hit rate. Next time Chris offers up some sage advice keep in mind that you would do better trusting a coin toss!
In the tech world we have expertly written Venture Beat edging out former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget’s Silicon Alley Insider. Venture Beat managed to hit an impressive 66.67% accuracy rate. The runt of the tech litter however was Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch with came bottom of the overall table with a woeful 20% accuracy rate, making them about as accurate as Barack Obama’s 10-pin bowling arm!
However the second test was to find out how much readers care about accuracy. Well using Compete to analyze traffic to entertainment blogs shows Perez Hilton remains the standout leader, followed by DListed and then Nikki Finke. All three blogs appear to have had fairly consistent traffic levels over the past 12 months. One can deduce that while readers of entertainment blogs seek celebrity gossip, inaccurate celebrity gossip seems just as good as the real thing.
Similar conclusions can probably be drawn in the tech world were TechCrunch leads the pack with more than double its nearest rivals user numbers. However VentureBeat and Alley Insider appear to still be growing strongly in the past 6 months while TechCrunch appears to have plateaued. Perhaps in the long run in tech credibility rather than confident speculation will win out in the end?
For politics it is harder to track each pundits ups and downs however a clear loser over the past 4 months was Chris Matthews who was pulled from MSNBC’s election coverage. However, there the reason was due to MSNBC’s concern about its perceived liberal bias as opposed to Matthew’s patchy record as a pundit.
This marks the end of Pundit Watch’s four month experiment. After this point we will no longer be recording new predictions however we will retain the leaderboard to see how the remaining predictions play out. Additionally, we have just launched partner accounts (with Reuters as our launch partner) so we will be inviting the nine pundits to join us there.
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