A number of people are talking about traffic figure to weblogs. I’ve been averaging around 300,000 page views a month for awhile. Frankly I’ve never seen a method to distinguish individual users reliable enough to bother with. I just these these metrics to track changes over time rather than as accurate guidelines for how much my web site is being viewed (I measure my success by how often I get attacked on discussion forums hosted by people who disagree with me — on that count, I’m doing just fine.)
One issue is just how important Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan and others are in sending traffic to web logs. According to Tres Producers,
The need for links from high-volume hubs like Winer, InstaPundit, and Andrew Sullivan has not diminished. As the volume of blogs has ballooned well into six-figures, the need for links from “star” blogs has become an absolute requirement to be noticed.
Maybe they have a large effect on blogs that are receiving little traffic (clearly they do), but I doubt the traffic they generate comes close to what larger sites could offer. I’ll give an example. Instapundit linked to an article I wrote on this site, and that link alone resulted in about 900 page views. Very impressive. A couple years ago, however, the population of the world hit 6 billion and CNN linked to my Overpopulation site. That link generated about 5,000 page views. Same thing happened when India hit 1 billion people — CNN linked and the traffic was tremendous.
Anyway, I don’t think it is true at all that you need to be linked to by one of these folks to get noticed. I was serving almost 400,000 page views a month long before the “warblogging” phenomenon. The bottom line is that if you put up great content — especially content that fits a specific niche — then you’re going to be noticed.
Lets be honest — if you want to start a blog focusing on the war on terrorism or the Middle East, good luck. If you’re a really great writer then you’ve got a chance, but there are already what, hundreds and hundreds of such weblogs. Who’s got the time? On the other hand there is plenty of room to get noticed with more specialized, niche content.
That is assuming, by the way, that you care about the amount of traffic. I like getting lots of traffic, but that is not why I keep writing (I keep writing because the voices in my head keep telling me to, but that’s another story).