State of the Blog: The Record Year of 2024 on Res Ipsa

We often use the end of the year to do a quick review of the state of the blog. We will soon pass our 87,000,000 view mark and our community continues to grow rapidly around the world.  As a mark of that growth, we are now staggering our periodic updates that used to occur with each new millionth marker since we are now surpassing a million such views on average in less than a month.

As always, I want to offer special thanks for Darren Smith, who has continued to help manage the blog.  I also want to thank our dedicated editors Kristin Oren and Hartwell Harrison, who continue their amazing work proofing posts on a daily basis to remove my embarrassing typos.  Finally, I would like to thank our regular readers who alert me to typos or any violations of the civility or copyright policies on the blog.

The growth on Twitter this year has been astonishing. We are now approaching 900,000 followers on X (formerly known as Twitter), up around 40 percent from last year. Thousands of new people have signed up for emails, and we have over 21,000 WordPress subscribers, double our number from last year.

This week, we passed 22,175 posts and roughly 1,430,000 comments.

So here are the annual figures. Over the last year, our ten biggest international sources for readers came from:

1. United States
   2. Canada
   3. Australia
   4. United Kingdom
   5. Germany
   6. New Zealand
   7. Netherlands
   8. France
   9. Japan
   10. Mexico

The biggest surprise was how Australia passed Great Britain this year as the second highest traffic outside of the United States.

The top five posts in terms of traffic in the last year were:

1. 1. Garland’s Moment of Truth: With the Perjury Referral, the Attorney General Faces a Clear Choice Between Principle and Politics
   2. Nightmare Scenario: How a Trump Trial Could Now Run Up to (or Through) the 2024 Election
   3. Jake Tapper and CNN Lose Major Motions in Defamation Case by Navy Veteran
   4. “The Laptop is Real”: Justice Department Denounces Claims of Russian Disinformation as a Biden “Conspiracy Theory”
   5. Congress’s Jan. 6 Investigation Looks Less and Less Credible

The success of the blog continues to amaze me. I am deeply honored to be the host of this blog and to see the continued rapid expansion of its readership.

We are now routinely ranked among the top legal blogs in the world. We have also attracted our share of accolades, including the ABA Journal for its blog Hall of Fame. That is due in large part to our regulars who add perspectives and passion to the issues that we discuss.

In these trying times, it is nice to have a place (even a virtual place) where you can go to discuss the issues from the momentous to the simply odd. I hope that you continue to find this to be a site worthy of your time and your contributions.

So, here’s hoping for a great year to come for our country, our families, and, yes, our blog in 2025.