These are numbers from July. More recent months have gotten "launches" from blogs like Andrew Sullivan's. As you note, there are many transients coming in through search engines, but a substantial number of "core" readers. Some of the repeats are just due to comments of course. I was prompted to check after noting Arnold Kling's
request for some of his readers to subscribe. I'm pretty happy with our numbers, so no reason for Arnold to feel any guilt.