Sunday, January 15, 2006 5:00 AM
As Blawg starts its fourth year in existence, I thought I would share a few statistics which I think are illuminating in assessing the growth of lawyer weblogs and feeds in general. As I looked over the visitor logs for 2005, I noted that (including views of its feed files) Blawg served up over 1 million pages for the year. Now, candidly, a certain percentage of these page views are what I will term 'spam views' or pages that were served as a result of a link from a referring site that has nothing to do with lawyer weblogs or the legal field in general. However, even discounting some percentage of these views, it is clear that the growth curve on traffic to Blawg has gone decidely and significantly upward.
Similarly, unique visitors to Blawg grew significantly in the last year to exceed 73,000, with a monthly averaging ranging from 6000 - 8000. Again, compared to 2003 and 2004, the growth curve is decidedly upward.
Finally, the number of visits to Blawg now exceeds 20,000 each month with some months ranging closer to 25,000+. Likewise, a continuing arc upward from earlier years.
In the bigger web picture, these numbers are not earth-shattering. But, for a niche like legal weblogs, the numbers are promising. Since day one, I have not approach Blawg as a money-making website (I do serve Google Ads so that I can recover my costs in hosting the site) and have not advertised or marketed the site. This reality leads me to conclude that the site growth has been organic and, I believe, parallels the growth in legal blogging itself.
I recall that in my first survey of the blawgosphere in December 2002/January 2003, I found a grand total of 57 law and legal related weblogs. Today, the number is in the thousands, not too mention the growth of RSS feeds from other, non-blawg, legal resources.
From the threshold of 2006, I see new challenges and opportunities arising within the blawgosphere. The sheer amount of information is overwhelming. Old line companies that serve the legal vertical continue to move towards RSS delivery, which will only serve to expand the choices readers can make in subscribing to content. The tools for sharing, aggregating and consuming blawgs and RSS feeds are getting better, but also mean a wider, more complex choice of options.
The opportunities presented by this rapid growth in size and complexity are clear. Forward-thinking companies are going to continue to step in to serve this marketplace, assisting content producers and consumers alike. More to come on this a later time. For now, in sum, with the seeming clarity of three years of hindsight at the helm of Blawg as well as a view to the promise of tomorrow, it seems to me the best is yet to come...