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!