A big number

Today we reached a huge milestone in blog traffic: 500,000 visits. When I started this blog with Anthony and Brad in January of 2007, we made a conscious decision to try to be as indifferent to traffic as we could and let it find its own audience. Things were slow for the first year, but our traffic grew significantly in 2008 and then doubled in 2009 — due in part to the fact that our cross-posting of Zizek’s article on the Iranian election protests happened to get a lot of links, but also due to our decision to start doing reading groups on new books in theology and philosophy. Comparing the same months in 2009 and 2010, we’re on pace to double our traffic this year again, and our subscriber numbers in Google Reader and Bloglines are generally on par with leading theology blogs.

I’ll confess that this blog has not been without its gimmickry — as I satirically pointed out last month, anything related to Radical Orthodoxy is apparently like the theology blogger’s crack — but for the most part I believe we have built our reputation on providing genuine value: book events, reading notes over untranslated texts by major philosophers, reports on conferences we attend, discussions of translation questions, draft syllabi, and our own original work in the form of conference papers and “straight-to-blog-post” releases. In this latter category, I’d like to single out Anthony’s creative work on ecology and his public working-through of Laruelle’s project.

Thanks to all — contributors, commenters, linkers, and lurkers — who have brought us to this exalted moment. Moving forward, I think we face two challenges. First, will we let this big number go to our head and compromise our integrity? Second, is there any possible way we can make some money off of this?