I was reading Dean Barnett’s excellent account of the political boat anchor known as the left-wing blogosphere, and this section got my attention:

The blogosphere’s growth has flat-lined, and in many cases shrunk. Last October, the Daily Kos had approximately 23 million visitors. By last month, the number had sunk to 16 million. The decline was gradual and sustained. Kos’s virtual progressive ranks, at least, are not growing.

The same trend is in evidence nearly everywhere else in the blogosphere, too. The second most influential left-wing website, Atrios, now averages fewer visitors than it did eight months ago and there is no data indicating the readership of conservative blogs is growing, either.

Well, I continue to quixotically resist the label of “conservative blog,” but I’ve been noticing a gradual but steady increase in LGF visitors for a while now.

Last year I sat down and wrote some code to count unique monthly visitors. It works by setting a cookie in the user’s browser that expires at monthly intervals. If the visitor doesn’t have the cookie, the hit is counted and the cookie is set. If the cookie already exists, the visit isn’t counted.

Like any web statistics algorithm, it’s far from foolproof. Some people routinely clear their cookies, or have them completely turned off. But since the majority of visitors don’t mess with their cookies, this method does give a reasonable rough estimate of the number of unique individuals who visit the site every month.

(And remember: it’s not nice to mess with your cookies.)

With those caveats, here are the last 12 months, according to our monthly counter:

Jun 2005: 673494
Jul 2005: 800635
Aug 2005: 808182
Sep 2005: 933191
Oct 2005: 1061965
Nov 2005: 935409
Dec 2005: 747716
Jan 2006: 979063
Feb 2006: 1130813
Mar 2006: 1267011
Apr 2006: 1204195
May 2006: 1323980

UPDATE at 6/18/06 8:05:31 pm:

(Oops! I pasted the January number incorrectly. Now corrected.)

UPDATE at 6/18/06 8:12:19 pm:

LGF reader cba, obviously more fluent in Excel than I, emailed this helpful bar graph: