OTB: 2004 Year in Review
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James Joyner | Friday, January 7, 2005 |
OTB went through some exciting changes in 2004, including a conversion to WordPress; taking on advertsing with BlogAds, Google Adsense, and Adure thereby diminishing the site’s asthetic appeal but generating significant revenue; and the addition of several additional authors to the site. On a personal note, I got substantial blogospheric help in my job search, landing my current job after my program manager saw this note at Glenn Reynolds’ InstaPundit.
Site traffic was up approximately tenfold over 2003. According to the stats kept by HostingMatters, OTB had 2.4 million unique visits, over 5 million page views, and over 17 million hits in 2004:
According to Site Meter, my traffic looked something like this:
(It’s off a smidge because I captured the image on December 30th)
Regardless, traffic is up exponentially from 2003, when I had something on the order of 250,000 total visits (having started the site on January 31). As the graphs illustrate, there was a huge spike in May. Unfortunately, this was the first of several spikes that came from news of hostages in Iraq being beheaded, with Nick Berg being the first victim.
The blogosphere as a whole seemed to explode after that, although with a mild post-election correction. Interestingly, OTB’s traffic now averages somewhere between 5,000- 7,000 unique visits a day. Eighteen months ago, that was what Top 20 blogs were getting. Not anymore.
The following sites referred the most traffic to OTB in 2004:
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Wizbang 110,000+
Backcountry Conservative 30,000+
InstaPundit 20,500+
VodkaPundit 22,000+
Michelle Malkin 19,500+
ScrappleFace 17,500+
Professor Bainbridge 17,000+
Political Wire 12,500+
Lucianne 11,000+
One Hand Clapping 11,000+
The Jawa Report 9000+
INDC Journal ~9000
PoliBlog 6000+
Hugh Hewitt 6000+
CalPundit/Political Animal 6000+
Blogs of War ~5500
Zygote-Design 5000+
Gut Rumbles (Blog City) ~4500
National Debate ~4500
Daniel W. Drezner 3500+
Ipse Dixit 3500+
Asymmetrical Information 3500+
Hot Abercromie Chick 3500+
WalloWorld ~3500
Accidental Verbosity 3000+
Signifying Nothing ~3000
Dean’s World ~3000
They’ll be enshrined in the left sidebar until they’re replaced by the next batch.
Several other notable milestones:
- Featured in Washington Post story on Beltway Bloggers
- Interviewed by Cam Edwards on NRA Radio
- Debated Duncan “Atrios” Black on Janeane Garafolo Air America program.
- Profiled by Norman Geras
- Made Hugh Hewitt’s recommended reading list
- Named Unqualified Offerings‘ Least Annoying Conservative
- At least five InstaLanches, including the afformentioned job notice.
All-in-all, a pretty good year.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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Congrats on the numbers James. I didn't find your site until November--just curious, what accounts for the big spike in May/June?
Thanks, Kappiy. I actually just edited the post to explain the traffic spike before I saw your comment.
Great job!
I'm fairly confident that by this time next year I'll make your top referrers list for 2005. It will be so.
Wizbang 110,000+
The majority of which was me, jumping back and forth between caption contests.
;)
Also: you changed from being a one-man band to presiding over a group blog.
LMA: See sentence one, final clause. :)
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