Instapundit: still growing 15% a month

A few months ago, folks worried that Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit blog had peaked. They shrugged off suggestions that the dip in traffic might be due to the holiday funk most sites experience.

Yesterday, Reynolds had , nearly triple what he was averaging in December. He’s on track to [url=http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=s11instapundit&report=33]double December’s visitor count.

The stampede of visitors is obviously fueled by the pending war with Iraq. But will peace (next week or next month we hope) erode Instapundit’s traffic?

My bet is no. Although Instapundit has been covered in dozens of general interest print and online articles, most people outside the blogosphere still haven’t heard of him. (None of my local friends remember hearing about the Knoxville blogging avatar, even though I mention him once a week.)

There’s lots of room to grow, both for Reynolds and other bloggers. I remember talking to some honcho at CNN.com in 1998, who explained that CNN.com traffic always hit new highs during big news events and then held that new level until more news came along to boost the site further. Other successful online publishers report the same ratchet effect.

To see this from another angle, Reynolds’ traffic seemed huge when he did 640,000 page views last June. Now, Instapundit is on track to do that number on a good day sometime this year.

This post from September 2002 offers a theory about some of the unique mechanics, beyond sharp thinking and swift writing, of blog traffic growth.

Living by the “own the niche and link like a banshee” rule, a slew of blogs — ranging from BoingBoing to Obscure Store to ScienceBlog to Gawker to Blogcritics — are riding the same sharp steady growth curve.

And, unlike traditional media like NYtimes.com and CNN.com and ersatz blogs like Always On, they are doing it part-time and/or with almost no overhead.