Playing in (web) traffic

This year, big changes in how Google records and reports traffic in its analytics platform caused us to reconsider how we think about, and talk about, traffic to our website. Remember when a certain fast food chain switched from counting the billions it had served to just saying “billions and billions” served? We’re basically doing the same thing. If you saw our Fiscal Year 2023 Annual Report from this summer, for example, we simply noted that once again “more than 45 million people visited” the website. We expect to take the same approach at the end of the calendar year, then again next summer when our current fiscal year ends, etc.

It’s not that we’ve stopped cherishing each and every visitor, or that we’re assuming our ubiquity in your search results and browser bookmarks will never change. Far from it. Instead, we want to put more focus on how people use our resources, and less on how many. After all, we’re long past the point where it’s just an incomprehensibly large number that trends ever larger over time. And it’s not like any of the challenges we face in publishing law online for free will change all that much when we hit 50 million annual visitors, or 60 million, or 100 million.

So, we’re paying more attention to what kind of events spark heavy traffic days and just how much traffic those events tend to yield over a “typical” day, and then we’re using those insights to think about what we can do differently and do better to bring as much legal information to the public as possible in the simplest and most connected way we can.