The impact of RSS on readership at law:/dev/null
Nothing law-related in today’s post. Â I stayed up late reading Contracts, but still got up on time, got out the door on time… and got stuck behind a tractor trailer for most of my early morning commute, thereby making it to class about 4 minutes late, just in time for a quiz in Legal Reasoning & Analysis. Â I was sick of law for the day by about 8:05am
The spark for today’s post actually came from looking at the server statistics for law:/dev/null: Â I didn’t realize how significant an impact things like RSS readers have on blog statistics, and I got my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science!
Last week we averaged about 312 unique visits a day. Â Now bear in mind a good chunk of those numbers are web crawlers and of course me, but factoring out the roughly 50% of the traffic from those two sources that leaves ~150ish daily visits –Â which completely blows me away btw, and I suspect is due in large part to people following shout-outs from other blogs like No634 and the Reasonably Prudent Law Student. Last Wednesday’s entry on Professor Torts murdering a student’s self-esteem was the spike for the week, with 660 unique visits.
But what about last Friday, when I fell asleep before writing anything? Â A mere 79 visits, of which it appears only 33% weren’t myself or bots — meaning only 26 unique visits by other humans, a drop of 83%+ over the week’s average (which was itself weighted down as a result of that particular low-traffic day).
How did all those folks who were stopping by daily know not to check for a post on Friday? Â Did everyone take the weekend off? Â Are we all psychically linked? Â Is my writing just that bad? Â (Don’t answer that last question ;))
My slightly-educated guess is that RSS readers, things like Safari’s “Top Sites” update indicator, and other new “content-on-demand” technologies are responsible for the overwhelming amount of traffic any given blog gets, at least in its formative months. On the upside it means a blog’s audience can expand rapidly in a fairly short amount of time if people visit once and then add you to their RSS feeds. Â The downside is that your traffic will virtually disappear if you’re not able to produce something on a fairly regular basis.
Those are my CSC-based pontifications for the day  Off to go study for “hump day” classes, which in my case actually are in the shape of a camel hump on my schedule (and, correspondingly, suck).  Have a great evening everybody!