International Law

The Death Of The China Blog Has Been Greatly Exaggerated.

By Dan

Received an interesting email the other day from a loyal reader complimenting us for having maintained our "Alexa ranking" through the "downturn" in blog readership. I then checked our Alexa ranking, which ranking is allegedly based on the number of readers and it looked pretty good, at least as compared with other leading China blogs. I then had one of our legal assistants review the blog rankings of all the China blogs of which we are aware to compare blog rankings for this post.  

I did this because I was mildly curious who is being read and who is not being read and, mostly, to see if there is any correlation between quality and readership. Not surprisingly, there is in that the most read blogs are all very good (I am excluding our blog from this description) though, as you would have guessed, there are some truly excellent blogs that are still wallowing in obscurity.

I also asked her to review whether readership of the leading blogs had, for the most part risen, fallen, or stayed the same. Based on her very quick review, she felt that readership had risen in the last two years for "nearly all of them." The Alexa number given is the overall rank (supposedly based on readership) of each site, with Google at #1, etc. Shanghaiist is number 1, ranked at 33,438, Danwei is number 2, ranked at 123,281, and this humble little niche law blog is number 3 at 173,628. Near as we can tell, we are the only China blogs with a ranking of less than 300,000. I have always had the utmost respect for both Danwei and Shanghaiist and if you are not reading them, you should be.  

I am not exactly sure what all of this signifies, if anything, but it does make me feel good to know we have so many readers and I will say we love 99.9999% of you.

What do you think?

Full post as published by China Law Blog on January 29, 2011 (boomark / email).