Little Green Footballs

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Is Charles Johnson going bust?

An anonymous reader wrote to us the other day to ask us why we're not picking up on all of CJ's recent posts about the migration of LGF to "new servers." The simple answer would be that this kind of stuff isn't very interesting.

But said reader suggested that all of CJ's techie talk needs to be seen in the context of the increasing number of ads that are appearing on LGF (and CJ's other project, pajamas media). And the fact that Johnson, according to someone who claims to know, has recently sold his house.

What could this point to? Either CJ is reaping the profits of his fame, upgrading his hosting service and moving to a bigger and better home.

Or, Johnson is slowly but surely going bust.

At this stage there isn't much to firmly point either way, but on the issue of servers at least there seems to be a hole in Johnson's reasoning.

You see, he claims that the servers are necessary because LGF's traffic is shooting through the roof. But if that were so, why is he getting far fewer comments per post these days than he used to? There was a time when readers would write hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand comments per post. Now, the number of comments is frequently less than a hundred.

As for the number of visitors, take a look at this graph.

Could it be that far from being an upgrade, CJ actually carried out a downgrade to cheaper servers, and had to completely rewrite his blogging engine to cope?

Could it be that not enough people are clicking on his ads, because they have adblocking software installed and don't see them in the first place?

Could it be that Charles Johnson has sold his house and his bike and now lives in a trailer park, sneakily tapping into the local diner's Wifi connection?

Do keep your tips coming, either in the comments on directly by email!

14 comments:

The Sphinx said...

Interestingly enough, his ads don't always contribute to his cause..

I was about to click on it. But then I remembered the few cents he'd earn because of that..

Anonymous said...

You give Charles enough rope...well....y'all know the rest

Anonymous said...

The trend for blogs seems to be down across the spectrum. Stats for dailykos show a similar trend (though they're still much better than lgfs).

[I reckon this is why CJ has so much hate for Kos - it's simple jealousy. Kos started later than CJ but quickly overtook him and consistenly averages over double the readership.]

Anonymous said...

Anyone know what happened last year to have caused that huge spike (this), the Israel/Lebanon war perhaps?

Anonymous said...

Hey Charles!

Muslims "taking over" london:

http://www.timeout.com/london/features/2976.html

I'd rather live and work amongst these "Islamofacists" than many of the LGF regulars.

Anonymous said...

"is charles going bust?"

Lets hope so...

Anonymous said...

> Anyone know what happened last year to have caused that huge spike (this), the Israel/Lebanon war perhaps?

Yes, and more specifically the "photogate" (or whatever it's called) story. Another of Chazza's proudest moments...

Anonymous said...

Interesting. The Alexa graph is mirrored by the Compete graph:

http://snapshot.compete.com/littlegreenfootballs.com

as well as (somewhat) the Quantcast numbers: http://quantcast.com/littlegreenfootballs.com

Pajamas media seems to be doing (relatively) better, but has no real growth:

http://snapshot.compete.com/pajamasmedia.com

http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpajamasmedia.com

It could be that Pajamas Media is downsizing, hence the move of servers. The investors' money has probably started to run out, and usually when people get VC or angel funding., they go hog-wild on servers.

Anonymous said...

LOL - If you go to LGF now it says:

lgf: Please stand by...

"Status: We've had a hard drive failure in our database server; it will need to be replaced.
Entropy at work. No ETA on the new hard drive yet, but we'll update here as soon as we know more."

The Sphinx said...

Now it reads: (No data has been lost; we have backups of everything.)

God dammit..

Anonymous said...

Bloody hell, they lost one hard disk so the whole blog comes to a halt? What sort of cheapo system are they using? If I were running an operation like Chuck's, I'd be sure to have redundant systems in place to handle the inevitable. He must be on a cheap host these days...

Pete

Anonymous said...

ha, still down...Charles is kaput and Hillary will be the next president of the U.S.


X, what are you gonna do now that you've beat Charles?

V said...

Now, now. Schadenfreude is such an ugly emotion... surely LGF will be back soon. Good thing too, because it keeps the lizards -- who would otherwise be out forming armed gangs and terrorizing brown people* -- safely ensconced in their basements.

* this isn't a paranoid fantasy -- some LGF discussions lately have come very close to suggesting precisely that. But of course we can't link to them just now. :)

Anonymous said...

V, your right, they are seriously going into meltdown over there. Its dawning on the more setenant ones that its all going to shit. If your pushed to the point of embracing Fred Thomson as a viable candidate, then you are truly lost. What else is there except form a militia,