Blog traffic and the rise and fall of blogs

I see a lot of references, both in cyberspace and sometimes in traditional media, to the decline of interest in blogs.  This is attributed to two main factors:  the current popularity of Twitter and the growth of Facebook, which many users treat as de facto blogs.  Certainly in philosophy, relatively few blogs have survived the long haul, and in academic law, many once popular blogs have closed entirely.

Meanwhile, we trudge along.  Traffic is, I'm pretty sure, somewhat down from the highs of 2012-2013--peak blog readership generally--but unfortunately I had to change stat counters in 2015 as the old one ("sitemeter" I think) went beserk, so I no longer have official, comparble stats from then.  Here's the yearly data on visits from 2015 through 2018 according to the new StatCounter; note that "returning visits" can only be measured for readers who visit from the same computer, which no doubt many do, but many others don't.  But since StatCounter (click on "public stats" at the bottom of the left column) includes those figures, I include them here (note that 2017 was the first year I began my reduced summer blogging schedule, although its effect on traffic was only slight):

	Returning Visits	Unique Visits	Page Views
2015	1,686,680	3,686,038	4,972,397
2016	1,768,696	3,564,079	4,835,466
2017	1,651,053	3,455,946	4,747,474
2018	1,688,305	3,566,762	4,860,347

Returning visits in 2018 topped the 2015 figure, but missed the 2016 high.  Unique visits in 2018 were higher than the prior two years, but lower than in 2015--and the same for page views.  All the changes were surprisingly small year-in and year-out.

Anyway, I owe thanks to you loyal readers, some of whom I know have stuck with the blog for many years!