Ranked by traffic.
ADDED: A poll, suggested by the fact that while I'm still #1 — on this list that doesn't include Instapundit — my page views are down 1.5% from last year, and Prof. Jacobson's are up 83.0%.
१३ डिसेंबर, २०१२
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Super Blog!
Down a bit. We know why. I think you've started to address it. Hope so.
Wow. Nothing is secret in the world of blogging.
grats. Though the sitemeter is a big deal on determining first place.
I read 4.
- althouse
- LI
- Instapundit
- VC
Congratulations!! You're number one....again!!
.....but your numbers are down a little from last year. So, we really encourage you to try a little harder.
I'll need your TPS report on my desk by noon.
All kidding aside, congratulations!
Yes, try harder. You get an A minus on this. Good effort. Needs more dogs, more linguistics, and fewer references to blog statistics. Also, fewer pointless comments. Oops!
I visit nearly daily because it's always entertaining and you have attracted quite a stable of bright, cogent commenters. And I figured out how to hide particular avatars, so that speeds things up considerably and reduces the temptation to respond to those who are best ignored. Overall your blog is a thoroughly pleasant experience and I appreciate what you do here and hope you appreciate us for showing up.
(and PS, I said something snarky about the dog pictures a while back and I feel badly about it now. I was stung that I had been rebuked, I felt unfairly, and I reacted childishly. Not that it matters to you what Erika says about dog snaps, but I wanted to get that off my chest. I feel better now and can enjoy the beautiful Zeus with a clear conscience. And no small measure of envy!)
I should say forthrightly that yours is one of my two favorite blogs. It seems like a direct, guileless extension of the way you think and the things that interest you, Professor, and because your thinking is interesting, wide, and deep, it's a lot of fun. Congratulations.
Oh, and my other favorite blog is Dave Barry's. You and he have a few things in common.
I was sorry to see it down. You can compare last year to this year here. There's little difference, so it's hard to see what happened, but the previous year was all that crazy Wisconsin protest stuff where we were providing a lot of original material.
I'd like to see traffic go up, but too much focus on traffic and you lose the flavor of the brand and the energy of the intrinsic pleasure of writing.
I could do more firebrand politics type stuff, but I only do it when moved and I'm actually pretty bland politically, so... it would be a traffic game. Which could be fun.
I could pay more attention to driving people crazy at least once a day.
What do you think?
I'm going to put up a poll here in a minute.
Take the poll!
And check back often to see the results!!!!!
What do you think?
You're right to think of brand and motivation. You could deliberately move in various traffic-gathering directions, but that would hurt both the brand and the motivation. Concentrate on your core skills, which are working for you already. That keeps the brand pure and the motivation high.
I can be reached at marketing_bs@blogtraffic.com.
Where is The Volokh Conspiracy??
Drive people crazy. What is the purpose of a good blog if not to stir the pot? With a few exceptions, you have an above average stable of regular commenters (though not as witty as the folks at Reason's Hit & Run) which usually keeps things from descending into the moronic tediousness found at sites like DU. You've also done some outstanding reporting in your neighborhood. As I've said before, when the histories of early 21st century American politics are written, blogs like Althouse will be cited as engines of change. Move inside history!
I look at Althouse as so much more than a lawprof blog. You certainly raise many interesting topics that aren't in that genre. Also, I enjoy your photography, your bicycle riding adventures, and lately, the dogs. The blog expands my awareness on many topics and is great reading even when I don't have time to comment.
First, you have a lot of pictures of dogs, and none of cats (or, at least not that many that I can remember one). Probably more cat people out there, and you may be chasing them away with all the dog shots. Maybe you should think about either getting some cats, or a friend with cats who likes to take pictures of them. The cuter the better. (It is getting so bad out there, that when I was looking at Smart TVs the other day, the tech person demoing them insisted on showing how he could browse and search for cute cat pictures on the TV).
Then, I would think about adding in some pics of beautiful almost (or completely) naked women for all the old geezers here, and maybe some beefcake for the women and the gay guys. Use your imagination to tie such to the posts. Between the cute cat pictures and the sex pictures, I think that you would have it made.
When I think of all the things one normally does to increase traffic on the internet, I believe that there are approximately none of them that you should do.
If I was looking for celebrity wardrobe malfunctions/nip slips/and exiting-vehicle-upskirts, I'd start somewhere else anyway.
Don't let the fact that I forgot to include side-boob induce you to thinking that's a vote for side-boob.
AustinRoth said...
Where is The Volokh Conspiracy??
It's everywhere, man. Everywhere.
Since I don't care that much about the law, I kind of like it as a dog blog.
I could pay more attention to driving people crazy at least once a day.
Topless photos would definitely drive most of the guys here crazy, and definitely would up the page views.
Let's take a closer look at those breasts.
ON a more serious note (and, please, please, please don't take me up on my suggestion for cuter cat pictures - dogs were invented for a number of reasons, and one of the key ones was to keep the cat population down), how did all your Madison labor movement reporting fit in there? For awhile, you and Meade were some of the go-to people for reporting there.
Another thought - you do have a fairly loyal community here. But, I think that the liberal trolls, at times, drive up the noise to signal ratio enough that some quit following it for awhile. The discussions sometimes seem to devolve into name calling as a result. Of course keep the more thoughtful libs, like AL, Freder, and really Garage too. But, I think that many of have our list of the 2 or 3 liberal trolls that we would most like to disappear here.
As a note, I have been following this blog for better than 8 years now, and think that it continues to improve. In particular, your posting seems to me to have improved over the years, and I think even over last year (ignoring the Madison protests that you and Meade were covering, which was very good).
@Ignarance: "Topless photos would definitely drive most of the guys here crazy, and definitely would up the page views."
Or reduce them, as the blog would be rendered NSFW, which is where I read this.
Professor Althouse, I don't comment here much, but I enjoy your posts and the back-and-forth comments. I say, you do the blog the way you see fit. We'll all find something to like.
When I was a child there was a Mad Magazine strip cartoon in which Hertz (There's Hertz. And There's "Not Exactly".) and Avis (We're Number 2. We Try Harder) competed back and forth with their slogans of the time. In the last panel, having completely demolished the number three rental car company, they shook hands in front of Alfred E. Newman's face. He wore a knowing, almost evil grin.
#1? #2? Who cares. Just don't become #3.
As a nation, we've just left that period where we decided to damn sense and reason, double down, and just go for it, which was an exciting rush of adrenalin and energy.
Now we're in the post rush quiet period where we try to go about our business, all the while pretending that things really are all 'up' from here, and to fend off the recurring thoughts that the crash at the end of this is going to be brutal.
Don’t worry about the down time, Ann. This is where you maintain with pictures of spring, dogs, and Poland, and some sprinkling in of curious and humorous things.
Save the powder for when the chickens come home and start roosting.
Then I want to see lots and lots of pictures of chickens.
Every damn one of them that came home.
Trying to hard to keep traffic up results in jumping the shark.
Please don't jump the shark.
I think you're right about '11 being something of a spike for the blog, although I think Prof Jacobson's blog has grown a great deal the last year.
Have you looked at the stats from '08, '09 (your love affair, courtship, marriage, and the delightful giddiness you showed us may have represented a spike, too), and '10 as well?
Of course, I also agree with Kevin and Ignorance, too.
PS Many congrats, Madame.
Comparisons are odious.
Althouse is a legal blog only occasionally, that is to say Ann only wades into those waters when the question is one of constitutional import, i.e. of interest to the public-minded citizen, and not merely procedural or tactical of interest mainly to lawyers. Instapundit is even less of a legal blog, in fact its stats ought not to be even counted in the comparison, furthermore Instapundit is more of a blog portal site than a blog itself. Powerline started as a legal blog but has since evolved into a commentary site on news and culture. Legal Insurrection and Volokh Conspiracy are more like legal blogs. They stay pretty much over the target and stray into general interest only seldom. These points being made I think its obvious that whatever the relative growth or decline among these blogs they are not a natural group, unless the only salient characteristic is being operated by a tenured professor of law ... jeez, talk about apples and oranges.
Apart for actual content (and the compilers these statistics evidently think actual content is irrelevant) the chief difference between Ann's blog and the others is the vibrant forum she hosts. None of the others really compare in that area.
(edited and re-posted)
If you want to improve traffic, you could start posting stuff like this!...
Oh, wait. That might drive people away, as I suspect more than a few commenters have forgotten how to smile and have take life too seriously. :-(
Blogger's ancient and terrible infrastructure is hurting you.
But seriously. There are a lot of blogs I just don't go to anymore, because they are too damned serious and only do one subject, typically politics. I still come here, because you do mix things up quite a bit, and post what ever strikes your fancy!
Plus, there is always the comments from Titus to look forward to!
Is this an open blog test?
I especially enjoy your take in the art and culture posts.
You are a great communicator and very much appreciated.
None of the choices are quite right to me, but some combination of 1 and 3 comes close.
Legal Insurrection is a group blog. I think having a good team of contributors makes it more robust and consistent than a blog written by a single diva.
We all saw what happened to Andrew Sullivan. His writing degraded over time into thought-free partisan gibberish -- but his traffic remains high. Perhaps it's because blog reading becomes a habit of impulse. To paraphrase McLuhan, you don't read blogs, you slip into them like a warm bath. Sullivan benefits from this phenomenon. He's familiar and predictable, and people make reading his blog a comfortable habit. He will always have a certain level of traffic. Likewise, traffic to the Althouse blog will probably level off at some number and stay there as long as the content remains predictable. To gain traffic, the blog would have to address the quality of the content. That might require more introspection than a diva is capable of.
Erika said...
I visit nearly daily because it's always entertaining and you have attracted quite a stable of bright, cogent commenters. And I figured out how to hide particular avatars, so that speeds things up considerably and reduces the temptation to respond to those who are best ignored.
How do you set this up?
If you just want to make up the traffic, you only need a couple posts a year about how a woman is presenting her breasts in a photograph, and that will do it.
Vortex posts.
Just make sure the videos and pictures of the dogs continues.
Don't change. My husband and I were discussing the Psy Anti American nonsense a few days ago and I said, "this is why I read Althouse and Taranto daily. They don't always take a partisan line."
"Give me a magazine cover with a beautiful girl, a dog, or a baby on it, and I'll give you a magazine that sells."
--William Randolph Hearst
I could pay more attention to driving people crazy at least once a day.
What do you think?
Go big on that. It's the most fun on the blog. And occasionally do comment semiprofessionally on legal topics of the day. And then gently tells us why our responses are legally speaking full of shit. Think of that as an expanded drive the readers crazy scheme.
"'I could pay more attention to driving people crazy at least once a day. What do you think?' Go big on that. It's the most fun on the blog."
Okay. Well, do you think I've done it yet today? More than once?
Well, the joint has gone to the dogs, lately.
But so what, unless you're trying to prove something. But what, I can't imagine. Really. What's left to [im]prove? Intellect? Regimen? Hypergraphia?
According to a Woody Allen variation, 80% of life is showing up. You've exceeded that marker, and then some.
Keep giving the Althouse lemmings what they demand! More daily updates on all the stupid things Meade says every day!
"Give me a magazine cover with a beautiful girl, a dog, or a baby on it, and I'll give you a magazine that sells."
I missed the baby pictures in my previous suggestions, but I think that you should also note that times have changed since then, and cats probably fit the lifestyles of more people these days than dogs, and have become the pets of choice for a lot of people.
Puppies. I've told ya and told ya that you need a puppy, now you have a reason. The dogs are Ok but it's the internet and puppies rule.
But no kitties. They attract the wrong sort of people.
After a year, when the cuteness starts to fade, there could be a suspicious "accident" involving a Segway. Then - a new puppy! Let's see Jacobson top that.
Do whatever you want, it is your blog. This isn't really primarily a law blog, anyway.
I said no. But I want to clarify I don't want you to change the content. Using other means to pull in more followers is fine, but changing what and how you bring information here is more likely to make me stop subscribing than help.
Also, is the rankings including RSS views? I only read stuff via RSS, and I don't always click through.
It would be hard to beat the rumble on Lake Mendota. No wonder your hits are down since then. And Mr. Jacobsen got a free gift from the faux Indian--call her an Indian giver. He likely won't be able to repeat that next year.
And I will say that Mr. Reynolds is getting a bit stale. I used to visit many new sites through his blog. But either I've been reading it too long, or he is just posting the same thing over and over again.
Dan King said...
And I will say that Mr. Reynolds is getting a bit stale. I used to visit many new sites through his blog. But either I've been reading it too long, or he is just posting the same thing over and over again.
I think this also. He's still a good editor, but he's missing the long essay from a no name that makes it around the sphere on its own excellence or originality. No one has that now.
Last year you were one of the few covering the happenings at your state house. If you were in Michigan, you could increase your traffic 3-fold with the equivalent coverage. Stick to your style. I enjoy the moments of candor and the video of harvesting your garden. It may sound silly, but seeing band practice in Madison is a fun visit to your site.
...cats probably fit the lifestyles of more people these days than dogs, and have become the pets of choice for a lot of people.
Another explanation for Obama's second term: cat-induced toxoplasmosis.
Cats are repulsive and if they become a regular feature, I'm leaving!
Amazon.com gift cards. You should start giving them out to your readers to boost your traffic. Alphabetically, of course.
Marshal, it's a bit of a workaround, but it does the trick. You may already be aware of the following, but since you asked:
1. do a CTRL+F and search for what/whom you don't want to have to wade through. See a lot of hits? Back button.
2. if you do want to read the thread anyway, but want to hide individual comments, click anywhere between XXX said.... and the person's avatar, and it'll collapse that particular comment.
I second someone's observation that there are far better blogging platforms out there that Althouse could be using. Something that allowed threaded comments would save people who like to read the comments, but in a discriminating fashion, an enormous amount of time.
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