Traffic Court 2008

2008 was a good year for our traffic court website. Here are some numbers:

Almost 900,000 visits (897K)
Over 700K unique visitors (different people using the website)
Over 2 million pageviews

The site's homepage was viewed over 220,000 times by over 150,000 people. The NY page had over 80,000 views by nearly 55,000 different people.

The top court pages were:
Jersey City Municipal Court (over 10,000 views)
Philadelphia Traffic Court (over 8,000)
and
Nassau County District Court (over 8000)

Not far down the list was our own Albany Traffic Court with over 7000 views. The Criminal Part page had over 4000 views. The Courts in California are on the rise and some of them will likely crack the top in 2009.

Overall, site traffic more than doubled from December '07 to December '08. Meanwhile 2009 is off with a bang. The Monday after a holiday weekend is usually strong, and January 5th was far and away the site's biggest day ever, with nearly 7000 visits. Tuesday and Wednesday were lower, but bigger than any day before Monday. Revenue from Google ads and direct attorney ads are both up dramatically, and the site remains profitable. We have invested nearly all the revenue in improving the site, adding courts and new features.

Speaking of which, any day now we will be introducing the lawyers' club. Lawyers will be able to create accounts, list themselves in a directory of traffic lawyers (by state, county and court), and write articles. The "killer app" (I think) will be a calendar feature accessible only to lawyer-members. Lawyers can put in where they're going to be. Lawyers who can't make it to a court appearance will be able to see who is going to be there. The club will be free for 2009, and we expect to charge $100/year starting in 2010.

Other site improvements will include a "flag comment" feature so people can easily note incorrect information, inappropriate content, copyright concerns or other issues. We are also improving our Google ads, though most users will not notice this. The site will use "channels", mainly by state, so people viewing NY pages should see less ads for VA attorneys and such.

While on 2008, I should mention that our law firm's main site: Albany Lawyer had over 100,000 unique visitors and over 200,000 pageviews. It is the driving force behind our firm. This blog was viewed by over 25,000 different users who viewed 40,000 pages. The top blog post hands down was my 2005 post about 1110a and our traffic violation research project - viewed over 4000 times. In a distant second and third place were posts about tailgating and marijuana dismissals, both from 2006. An August 2008 post on car depreciation is booming and was the #1 post for December. I'm a little puzzled by that one.