Are My Big Traffic Gains Over?

Most bloggers track their traffic pretty regularly and I am no exception.

I use sitemeter to track my traffic and frankly my web traffic has been pretty flat at about 150,000 page views per month since November of last year.  That was after a non-stop growth for the past two years.

At first, I chocked it up to a short month in December (people take off the week between Christmas and New Years).  But then January was flat again and I couldn’t really explain that. Then February was flat again and I thought maybe it was the short month at work.  But now that March is in and its another flat month, I am wondering if the traffic gains are over and my audience has flattened out.

So I went to Alexa to see what the deal is with other prominent blogs.  I picked a fairly random sample of high profile bloggers who talk about the same things I am interested in; Jeff Jarvis, John Battelle, Om Malik, Jason Calacanis, and me.  And here is the chart:

It seems that everyone in this chart, with the possible exception of Om Malik, has been flat since year end 2005.

Interestingly, the unique IP addresses I see every month continues to increase and the number of people subscribing to my various feeds continues to grow nicely.

So I suspect what is happening is that as the number of blogs that are out there continue to grow, people are changing their reading habits and visiting a wider set of blogs than they used to.  They still get to the blogs they started with but maybe not every day like they used to.

That’s just a hypothesis. If anyone else has data or opinions to share on this subject, I am all ears.