SCOTUSblog Sees Traffic Surge With Health-Law Ruling

By Keach Hagey

Breaking big Supreme Court news isn’t easy.

Just ask CNN and Fox News, which got their initial reports wrong Thursday morning, announcing that the individual mandate had been struck down when in fact the high court’s complex decision amounted to upholding the law. (CNN later apologized and Fox said it was just reporting the news as it came out.)

The difficulty of making sense of complex court decisions at lightning speed makes it all the more impressive that one news organization that roughly tied with Bloomberg and the Associated Press in breaking the news correctly at 10:07 a.m. was SCOTUSblog, a small Supreme Court blog normally read by lawyers and other hardcore law enthusiasts.

“We had more hits today than we had probably in the first six and a half years of the blog combined,” said Tom Goldstein, the blog’s owner and publisher. “There were roughly one million people on the blog at one time.”

Until recently, SCOTUSblog didn’t have much of a business model. Mr. Goldstein and his wife, both lawyers, started it a decade ago as a way of advertising for their law firm and hopefully drumming up business as Supreme Court counsel. But that strategy never really worked, and instead the blog evolved into a respected journalistic enterprise devoid of promotional references.

“I just lit money on fire, so that for the last couple years I was losing a quarter of a million dollars each year,” said Mr. Goldstein, who personally funded the site.

That changed last fall, when Bloomberg Law became the SCOTUSblog’s exclusive sponsor. The multiyear sponsorship, whose terms haven’t been disclosed, has enabled the site to build out its platform while remaining free—and ending Mr. Goldstein’s heavy cash outlay, he said.

Larry Thompson, the CEO of Bloomberg Law, said Thursday that “the incredible public service that we see demonstrated by SCOTUSblog today” was the primary reason that the company wanted to do the sponsorship. But the sponsorship also includes a swapping of links between Bloomberg Law and SCOTUSblog and a way of exposing law students, who are eager readers of the blog, to the Bloomberg Law brand.

Accommodating the huge traffic surge was expensive. SCOTUSblog beefed up its server capacity from one to six and had five reporters and two technical staffers on hand to cover the news. “We spent $25,000 just to get through this morning,” Mr. Goldstein said.

But Mr. Goldstein isn’t worried about having to sustain the costs for too long. While the site had received more than three million hits by mid-afternoon the day of the historic ruling, he said, “next Thursday we could be back down to 40,000.”

Goldstein visits the set of WSJ’s Digits show to discuss the traffic surge: