Globalizing the Legal Blogosphere

I am procrastinating. Instead of grading exams or providing some substantive post on international law, I’ve been looking at Opinio Juris’ site statistics. Now, it’s no secret that law bloggers, like politicians, are constantly looking for affirmation of their popularity, usually in terms of how many “daily hits” a site receives. My co-blogger Roger Alford has already done some heavy lifting on this score, tabulating the most popular law blogs (see here and here). Similarly, we worry about who reads us – is it our academic colleagues? Our students? Or, actual practitioners in the field? As self-appointed internationalists, we also wonder where our readers hail from: how “international” is our readership?

In truth, the vast majority of our readers come from the United States (80% of you at the time of this post, although such data is only a snapshot in time, changing over a given day, depending on readership). And, it turns out that we’re not alone in being a nearly exclusive U.S.-phenomenon. Check out popular law blogs like the Volokh Conspiracy (96% U.S.-based hits), How Appealing (96%), Prawfsblog (95%), or ProfessorBainbridge.com (87%). Perhaps most surprisingly, Concurring Opinions, which has no avowed international angle, actually ends up in a virtual tie with our readership — 80.7% when I visited it this evening. [Note — it seems the links to each site’s country share percentages gives you the country share at the time the reader visits the site, not the country share at the time I compiled my informal survey; thus, clicking the links may give you somewhat different percentages than those I cite herein.]

This leads me to a few questions. First, am I safe in assuming that a more diverse geographic readership is a desirable end? I guess the answer is easy for us here at Opinio Juris given our focus on international law and world affairs. But, what about law blogs more generally – can they (or should they) seek a more international audience? I’d be interested to know what others think on this front.

Second, just as there seem to be a fair number of law blogs with a nearly exclusive U.S. readership, it got me wondering whether there are similarly geographically isolated web-communities out there on international law that we here in the United States might benefit knowing about and reading regularly. Are there any widely read international law blogs in Europe, Asia, Africa or South America? Just as it might be useful to increase non-U.S. readership here at OJ, what can we do to increase our own blog-time beyond U.S.-based sites so that we gain a broader perspective on international law and world affairs. Any suggestions?

And finally, I wonder why some of these U.S. law blogs are actually competitive with Opino Juris when it comes to their readers’ geographic diversity. I would think we’d be ahead of the curve in terms of a globalized readership. Thus, rather than only asking why do U.S. legal blogs get so little readership outside the United States, we could flip the question around and ask instead why 13% of the Sentencing Law and Policy Blog’s readers actually come from outside the United States. And why exactly does Concurring Opinions get so many foreign hits? It wouldn’t have anything to do with that site’s unending fascination with using a nude Jennifer Aniston to increase its daily hits, would it?