Blue Mau Mau and Other Multi Author Legal Blogs

Over at Lexblog, the other day, Rob Gotta interviewed Eugen Volokh about his multi author legal blog, the Volokh Conspircacy.

Rob La Gatta: The Wall Street Journal Law Blog has called you "one of the undisputed kings of the blawgosphere." At what point in your blogging career did you realize you had achieved such a prestigious title, and what do you think was the most important factor in getting you there?

Eugene Volokh: I can't say we merit the title, but I am happy that we've got a lot of readers, and tend to get a good many links. Why? My guess: We've been around for a long time; we have people who are expert on interesting topics; we post a good deal of stuff on those topics; and most of our posts are accessible and interesting to laypeople as well as lawyers.

I thought about this for awhile. Is the Volokh blog still prestigious, in terms of its Alexa rank and pageviews? How does it compare to BMM, which has posts about franchising law aiming to be accessible and interesting to laypeople? What are the relative positions of the two multi author websites?

Here is the first picture: rank since 2005. Volokh is brown and BMM is blue.

You can see that since 2006, the Volokh blog has been steadily losing ground and will probably fall out of the all important 100,000 list. (Over 100,0000 indicates that traffic is so sparse that the Alexa rankings are suspect.) The BMM site, on the other hand, is an band of 50k to 60k. I would argue that the Volokh blog is no longer the undisputed leader of the legal blogs. And it may fall further in popularity. The next picture shows the last years pageview count. Again Volokh is in brown and BMM in blue. Pageviews reflect how deeply readers look into the blog or site. A small pageview count indicates that individuals simply look at the front page, while a large pageview count indicates that individuals are reading more than simply the front page. (This is a tricky measure because pageviews can be manipulated.) It would appear that more people are getting more value from the franchising law site, BMM, than are getting from the less specialized law blog, Volokh. What do you think? Should we ask for a recount from Lexblog? What are your views about BMM?