From the NYT on The Independent Journal Review, number 2 on the list:
IJReview, a two-year-old site started by a pair of Republican operatives, has emerged as one of the most popular online destinations for conservatives. The site mixes entertaining, shareable topics like pets through a conservative-values lens (for example, a recent piece about a dog helping to heal a sick veteran) with articles about politics and policy.
“It’s like if you crossed RedState with BuzzFeed,” said Alex Castellanos, a Republican political consultant and an adviser to IJReview.
IJReview has roughly 24 million unique visitors a month, according to the most recent Quantcast rankings. Its traffic exceeds that of more seasoned right-wing sites like the Drudge Report, Newsmax and Breitbart News, and is not far behind other conservative brands like Fox News and TheBlaze.
The site’s founders, Alex Skatell and Phil Musser, say that its popularity comes from having mastered “social sharing” on websites like Facebook and Google. They boast of the ability to generate maximum traffic from a minimum number of articles. In August, for instance, IJReview received 14 million shares on Facebook from just 646 articles, according to NewsWhip, a site that tracks social sharing. By contrast, Huffington Post, the leader in Facebook shares, had four times as many shares at nearly 55 million, but with 38 times as many articles.
I’m sure this is a dumb questions but what does it mean the site has “unique” visitors (as opposed to just visitors)?