This is hilarious. The right-wing site olbermannwatch.com has officially shut down. It says this on their front page:
There is no disguising the fact that we have been extremely unhappy with the recent decision of NBC Universal to not only retain Keith Olbermann for four more years but to elevate him in an unprecedented fashion. We had held out hope that MSNBC would allow Olbermann’s contract to expire even up until the last few weeks. But the deal is done and our Countdown Clock expired at midnight on March 1, 2007.
Given this, we have come to the conclusion that we have done more harm than good over the past 2+ years in keeping Olbermann in the public eye at a time when few were watching his show and even less cared about his assault on the journalistic standards we hold dear. So, after careful consideration and consultation with the entire staff, we have decided the time has come to retire OlbermannWatch.com.
It’s been a great run. We certainly had a lot of fun running the site but it’s just been increasingly difficult to maintain our enthusiasm as Olbermann’s ratings have increased and a compliant media has done everything to boost Olbermann and his show.
This statement was also edited by the site. Raw Story reported on it earlier and showed the ignorance Robert A. Cox, the editor of olbermannwatch.com, took in the decision. He removed the following from the statement:
We have come to the conclusion that we have done more harm than good over the past 2+ years in keeping Olbermann in the public eye at a time when few were watching his show and even less cared about his assault on the journalistic standards we hold dear
So what kind of impact did Olbermannwatch have on Olbermann’s ratings? Let’s compare the traffic of Olbermannwatch to that of Crooks and Liars. For this, we turn to the handy tool called Alexa:
Now that red line is Crooks and Liars. That little blue line, barely poking up – well that is Olbermannwatch. To put it in better perspective, Crooks and Liars averages around 150,000 hits a day. Olbermannwatch got around 1,000 hits a day. I doubt they really did anything to boost Keith’s ratings.
Watching Olbermann has much more on this.