Pushing back with statistics

Every so often, the Drug Czar’s “blog” like to justify its existence by bragging about how many “hits” it’s received. My previous critiques here and here) apparently touched a nerve, because this time they included page view numbers. They claim that in March they received a record 139,000 page views.
Now that’s a significant number. Drug WarRant gets a very respectable 15,000 page views per week, so that would mean that Pushing Back gets more than twice as much. Now, far be it from me to accuse the drug czar of lying about this, but it does make me wonder just who is reading his blog?
Generally, if there’s a site getting a lot of visitors, there’s a strong network of links to it driving business, so I checked link:pushingback.com at google. In my informal analysis of the links that came up (and not expanding to similar pages), I counted seven links from drug policy reform sites, one from a non-drug policy site that was demonstrating how absurd the ONDCP is, six links from some kind of mention relating to an ONDCP press release in a news-related site, one link from a drug prevention site, and 16 links from sites owned by the White House.
Of course, when it comes to blog links, it’s almost entirely from our side.
So all I can figure from this is that the ONDCP is thanking us for sending so many people to laugh at them. Either that, or a lot of government employees are clicking on links over and over.
Of course, I don’t mind if people read pushingback.com. I link to them on a regular basis. The truth isn’t afraid of people seeing all sides. The more knowledgeable people are, the more they support drug policy reform.