Economics and Blogging

Recently I have been undergoing a rather large spate of traffic. In fact, yesterday I had 79 hits, over three times what I had pulled on average the week before. Already today I have 60 hits. When I checked my referrer logs, I saw that most of the traffic was coming from Colt's excellent blog, Eurabian Times. I checked his site out, and lo and behold, he had linked to some of my work on Russia's future. After noticing this, I remembered that Charles had linked to Colt's site, and that he had no doubt received a fairly large amount of traffic from LGF. Because Charles had linked to the main page of Eurabian Times, people for a while were focused on Colt's post about my Russian series. This undoubtably lead people to visit my site. I wouldn't be surprised if several people were directed from my site to a few of the lesser known sites on my blogroll, such as Rob's Crushing Dissent or LJ's Urban Empire. (Note: I would appreciate some info about possible referrals from here) So what appears to have happened is a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand people visited Colt's site(I am unable to determine the true extent with his count meter), and a couple of dozen people progressed from his site to mine, and possibly a couple of people moved from my site to Rob's or LJ's.

So how does this relate to Economics? Simple, it is a perfect example of the Trickle Down Theory in action. People from LGF trickled down to Eurabian Times, and people then trickled down from Colt's site to History's End. And then perhaps some more trickled down to some site that I linked to. Trickle Down Theory is very contentious in the field of Economics, and has many critics, and thus few save avid partisans are sure of its effectiveness. But one thing is clear, it has proven its applicability to the blogosphere. This same pattern has been demonstrated time and time again, and is almost certainly how most blogs gain readers, with the possible exception of direct links from major Hubs and Gateways such as Instapundit and USS Clueless. "Insta-launching" isn't all too common, so therefor most blogs must get their traffic from the trickle down effect. Or at least, that is what a "top-to-bottom" theory would state. A "bottom-to-top" theory would argue that people get attention from smaller, specialty sites which direct their traffic to the Hubs/Gateways( I am a Top theory guy myself).

UPDATE: Rumcrook said this of my theory that blogs I have linked to will have picked up some of the "LGF trickle":

sounds about right, my stats have shown a few people trickling in from your link to me, and it didnt start untill you were linked by eurabian.

kinda neat how the web of information mirrors the web of economics.

Indeed. I wonder if there are any other ways that economic theory can be applied to blogs...