BLAWG AUTHORS OR CELEBRITY SUPERSTARS? An article about weblogs-for-lawyers explains how the "explosive growth" of weblogs can make any lawyer a blawging superstar.

Meanwhile, Aaron of The Stopped Clock says "don't believe the hype." And Mike Cernovich of Crime & Federalism agrees that some lawyers might be "exaggerating" their estimates of the number of reader they receive.

Weblog authors could easily silence the skeptics by making their hit counters public (though even then, some hit counters are notoriously unreliable). I understand why some don't want to share their numbers, but it might make sense for anyone who's willing to boast publicly about their readership. As for me, although I always deflect reporter's questions about the number of readers I receive (the number decreases when law school lets out), my own hit counter is public.

Comments

[Mike]

I don't understand why people misstate their traffic. It makes no sense. It also has the negative effect of discouraging good bloggers from blogging. "Well, I only get a 100 hits a day, but George gets 200 million. I feel inadequate."

There are two really high hit law blogs: Volokh, which averages around 10,000 daily unique visitors (even that number is smaller, but I don't want to bore you all by nuancing SiteMeter); and How Appealing, which subject to the above caveat, averages 5,000 daily unique visitors. [I consider TalkLeft a poli-blog.] I think #3 is Berman at SL&P, which averages around daily 2,500 unique visits.

That's mighthy impressive traffic, but it's still tiny when compared to popular poli-blogs like Instapundit (150,000 to 200,000 daily visitors). Hell, if you consider Volokh a law-politics hybrid, then the top blawg gets (and some might put "only" here) 5,000 visitors a day.

Again, that's impressive. But very small when compared to popular non-law blogs.

[Mike]

Oh, I had a point. There might be giants sleeping amoung us. But, to paraphrase Hume: Extraordinary claims extraordinary evidence. Private traffic counters do not provide that evidence.

[Monjo]

Actually SiteMeter *misses* a lot of hits. My web site's stats have broken but I know in the past many visitors (such as an ex-gf) just werent logged by sitemeter and I've no idea why.

[Mike]

Monjo, I've experimented with about a dozen counters. SiteMeter provides "rough justice."

I actually prefer StatCounter because it allows me to track repeat visitors. (Even this can't be done with 100% certainty, since some ISPs gives you a new ISP number each time you log on to the Internet.)

[Evan]

Monjo: Typepad stat counters miss hits too; I don't about Sitemeter. Many of my own readers read this site on RSS readers like Bloglines, so don't get picked up by Sitemeter (or any other hit counter that I know about).

In any event, 300 hit per day or 10,000--it's not going to change your life. If you get up to Instapundit's numbers, your life might change, but as Mike says, good luck getting huge numbers on a law-related weblog. It's political weblogs that blog surfers get all bug-eyed about. Don't ask me why. It often seems like a lot of shouting to me.

Meanwhile, David Giacalone has done some posts about the way the hit counters often overstate the real numbers.

[Beldar]

BeldarBlog's Sitemeter page view count from March 4, 2010, to this moment: 1,434,221.

Beldar's legal fee revenues directly or indirectly attributable to those page views: $0.00.

Now, it's true that I don't blog as a marketing device; far from it, I practically discourage readers from trying to hire me, and I write about a lot of things besides law. But color me skeptical about some of the claims being made.

[Ted]

Speaking as one of the handful of people for whom blawging actually made a difference in their careers, Overlawyered would be #2 or #3 on Mike's list depending on how one counts hits to interior pages through google searches; the 2300 people on our mailing list who aren't "hits"; and whether Mike's counts reflect weekday counts or average daily counts including weekends. Too, Volokh and How Appealing are daily reads, while Overlawyered is a site that tends to be perused less frequently, but may well have as many unique readers of any given post. In terms of generating business, I got one legitimate (as opposed to several random and inappropriate) client inquiry that didn't pan out into a representation, but that might have been different if I had made a systematic attempt to pitch clients using the blawg.

Is it really the case that SCOTUSblog isn't doing at least as well as SL&P?

[Beldar]

Ack. I don't have a time-traveling Sitemeter. Meant to say "March 10, 2004," not "March 4, 2010."

[Mike]

Hi Ted. Last I checked, SCOTUSBlog got around 1,000 unique visitors a day, though on Mondays their stats are much higher. They actually have a pretty comprehensive counter, which you can see by scrolling to the bottom of their page.

Like you, my blawg has made a difference in my life. I currently have three (small) writing gigs directly caused by my blawg. I've also had at least one request for representation, that I referred, that seems like it will pan out (a good Sec. 1983 case, actually). Recently, through my wife's pipeline, I referred a case to a lawyer I was impressed with because of his blawging. So, in a sense, I'm a True Believer.

But what if one devoted the time spent blawging to other projects, meeting-and-greeting, etc.. Maybe those methods would lead to the same results - or even better ones. Who knows?

Then again, maybe some people aren't capable of typical rain making activity. Blawging is unique in that nerdiness is rewarded, and social skills (assuming a person is polite) are less important. In the blawgosphere, nerds rule!

[Howard Bashman]

According to Site Meter's explanation of how it counts visits, if someone reloads your site every 30 minutes, it's counted as a single visit, but each reload adds an additional page view. Yet if someone reloads your site every 31 minutes, each reload is counted as a new visit and a new page view. I don't know whether multiple users visiting from the same IP address are counted as separate visitors or not, and somewhere I recently read a comment expressing doubt over whether additional visits are reported to Site Meter if an ISP caches the content locally for its users.

In any event, my site lists three separate counters, and never do they record the same number of visits. Lately, I have seen others try to emphasize Site Meter's measurement of "average visit length," expressed as a measurement of time. See, for example, this blogads pitch. I don't know what that calculation of time proves, but I do note that as of this moment my blog's average visit length is reported by Site Meter at 2:33, The Volokh Conspiracy's average visit length is reported by Site Meter at 0:34, and InstaPundit's average visit length is reported by Site Meter at 0:06.

For me, I get the most satisfaction not out of the raw numbers that Site Meter reports, but out of having developed a loyal audience (1) that visits my blog whether it's being linked to elsewhere or not and (2) that will take the time to click on links to other blogs that I provide when I tell my readers that those other blogs contain something that's worth a visit.

[Aaron]

I think the most important measure of your website's "success" should be one that correlates to your goals. If your goal is to get the most "eyeballs" to your site, logging your traffic is important. If you have a more mundane interest, such as inspiring comments to your posts, you don't need to log your traffic. If you are interested in generating clients, while you need to take care such that you can track which leads come from your website, site traffic is a valid consideration, but the better measure of your site's "success" would be the number and quality of client leads generated over time. If you are interested in generating media contacts, count the number of times reporters phone you. (Reporters will often volunteer how they found you, and in my experience will always tell you when asked.)