2007 Blog Year-in-Review

By Eric Goldman

A look back at 2007:

Most Popular Blog Posts

1) The Most Effective Anti-Terrorism Law EVER

2) Utah Bans Keyword Advertising

3) Rescuecom v. Google Law Professors’ Amicus Brief [overflow from #1]

4) Sex.com — An Update

5) Regulating “Stealth” Marketing [overflow from #2]

6) Keyword Ads and Metatags Don’t Confuse Consumers–J.G. Wentworth v. Settlement Funding

7) American Airlines Sues Google Over Keyword Ads

8) Search Engines Defeat “Must-Carry” Lawsuit–Langdon v. Google

Some Posts You Might Have Missed the First Time Around

* The Victorian Internet

* Best and Worst Internet Laws

* Gifts for Incoming First Year Law Students

* Israel Trip Reflections

* Suggestions for Conference Organizers

Blog Statistics

* Despite the overall softness in the legal blogosphere market, all of the blogs’ key metrics (unique visitors, visits, page views) roughly doubled in 2007 compared to 2006.

* Google represented about 90% of search engine referrals.

* Top 10 referral search terms: “sex.com”; “barbri class action”; “law professor salaries”; “law professor salary”; “eric goldman blog”; “donotcall.gov”; “facebook connectu”; “eric goldman”; “goldman”; “american blinds”. This is the third year in a row that “law professor salary” was a top 5 referral term. I wonder why such a small number prompts such great interest?

* The blogs had about 320 posts this year. Top categories include derivative liability, search engines and trademarks, each with about 70 posts this year.

* According to Google Analytics, I had visitors from 184 countries, including countries with low Internet usage (<50k Internet users per CIA Factbook) such as Greenland, Guinea-Bissau, Andorra and Reunion. * AdSense continues to disappoint. My eCPM has been progressively decreasing over time, and it's down to $1.60 in 2007. As confirmation of how poorly AdSense performs for my site, in the month of December, I earned about 3X from Amazon Affiliates program than I did from my AdSense on my blogs, even though I have affiliate links only on about a half-dozen pages (compared to the couple thousand pages displaying AdSense ads). Blog Year-in-Review from 2005 and 2006