August 02, 2010 08:34 PM UTC

One Month Later, Colorado Pols is Bigger Than Ever

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• by: Colorado Pols

Back in early July we posted at Colorado Pols about a “cease and desist” letter that we received from an attorney representing The Denver Post and 16 Colorado newspapers. The letter demanded that Colorado Pols immediately stop “any and all unauthorized literal copying from our clients’ newspapers or websites.”

Though we didn’t believe the legal arguments to be particularly strong, we complied with this demand primarily because we knew that wouldn’t mean much at all to our readers and our traffic to just ignore the Post and those other news outlets. As we wrote on July 7:

One of the neat things about the Internet is that we don’t have to make assumptions here – we can actually show you whether or not referencing the Post is vital to our “business model.” In April 2010, the last full month that we referenced the Post or any of the outlets included in this letter, Colorado Pols generated 617,661 page views. If it were true that our very existence depended upon the Post and similar news outlets, it would stand to reason that our traffic would drop dramatically once we stopped talking about them, right?

We’ve told you what kind of traffic we received in April, and we’ll tell you what kind of traffic we have once the month of July is completed – an entire month of no references to the Post or others listed in the letter, from either us or others posting diaries or comments. We are fully confident that our traffic won’t decrease because we aren’t referencing the Post, because we know that our success has absolutely nothing to do with the Post, the Lamar Ledger, or any other news site. People come to Colorado Pols to read (wait for it) Colorado Pols. It’s not any more complicated than that.

So what happened? Exactly what we knew would happen: Not referencing the Post or these other newspapers has done absolutely nothing to hurt our readership:

COLORADO POLS TRAFFIC

April 2010: 617,661 page views

July 2010: 891,053 page views

Not only does Colorado Pols continue to thrive without content from the likes of The Denver Post, but we’re bigger than ever. In fact, at our rate of growth Colorado Pols should cross the “1 million page views per month” threshold before November.

So for all of the traditional news media executives and editors who believe that blogs like Colorado Pols only exist because of their reporting and writing…well, let’s just say you’re going to need to think up a new angle here.