Stagnation in the Law Prof Blogosphere?

Orin Kerr (George Washington) on The Volokh Conspiracy:

In the 2003-06 period, it looked like the blawgosphere — the part of the blogworld devoted to law blogs — was expanding rapidly and becoming more and more important. As 2007 comes to an end, however, I think we can see a very different picture for 2007. For the most part this was a year of little growth or even a slight decline among law blogs. …

Most of the major blogs have kept going, and readership on the whole has been roughly stable. But my sense is that there hasn’t been a lot of growth in overall law blog postings and readership. What happened?

Most leading law professor blogs indeed have had stable traffic in 2007 as measured in monthly page views (e.g., Balinization, Business Law Prof Blog, Concurring Opinions, Conglomerate, ContractsProf Blog, CrimProf Blog, Discourse, Election Law, Family Law Prof Blog, Ideoblog, Jurisdynamics, Legal Profession Blog, MoneyLaw, OpinioJuris, PrawfsBlawg, Sentencing Law & Policy, Volokh Conspiracy, White Collar Crime Prof Blog). A few, however, have bucked the trend and experienced significant traffic gains in 2007 (e.g., Empirical Legal Studies, Leiter’s Law School Reports, M & A Law Prof Blog, Madisonian, Religion Clause, TaxProf Blog, TortsProf Blog, WorkplaceProf Blog). At our Law Professor Blogs Network, the number of blogs and monthly page views have increased over 33% in 2007.

Of the huge non-law focused blogs run by law professors, Althouse and Hugh Hewitt have had stable traffic in 2007 while InstaPundit has experienced sizeable traffic gains. Although many of the popular law blogs run by non law professors (like David Lat’s Above the Law and the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog) do not have publicly available Site Meters, others do — How Appealing has had stable traffic in 2007, while De Novo and Legal Underground have had declining traffic.

For further discussion of Orin’s post, see: