They have not seen blistering growth since. They haven't grown much at all in two years, since the initial burst of growth early into their existence. The clock is ticking on Vox, they either have to generate substantial growth soon, or they're guaranteed to go under (these new media sites are universally red ink machines, betting on continual capital investment to try to get a lot larger, then the growth stops but the red ink continues and they go under, same business concept failure repeating over and over again).

Their traffic is directly measured:

https://www.quantcast.com/vox.com

Indeed they are; Vox has improved the Q factor of the left wing echo chamber like nothing since the rise of huffpo.

Well put. Has the idea of a quality factor (Q) for a political "echo-chamber" been defined? Seems like an opportunity to inject some rigor into some commonly used terms.

One could measure the decay time of conspiracy theories through number of articles/posts published to determine the Q.

Or one could try to determine the bandwidth, as the allowed deviation from orthodoxy - a high Q chamber would have everyone parroting the exact same thing, whereas a low Q chamber would admit significant variability. Seems harder to quantify this measure though.

Also no reason to assume those two measures would be consistent. Needs a more rigorous approach to ensure self-consistency.