Today, we are blogging on our own behalf: We celebrate Antitrustpolitics.com’s first birthday! Counting this one, we managed to publish exactly 54 posts within the first year. Time for a not entirely serious review of the past year and an opportunity to dare a look into the future of our blog.
Oh no – is it this time of the week again?
Our intention was and is to create real added value for our readers with exciting and topical contributions every week. Our biggest concern was that we would not “run across” a topic for a new post every week. However, this concern did not prove to be true. To the contrary, every week we have to fight in the editors’ conference, that lasts several hours, which of the many topics should make it to the blog this week. And if we cannot agree on a topic, we will just find a cute dog picture and figure out which topic best matches the dog’s coat colour.
It is all about statistics
The ability to access a few statistics on our posts has both good and bad aspects: For each post, various information can be retrieved, for example from which country posts are accessed. Admittedly, Germany holds the pole position, followed relatively closely by the US. Belgium and the UK battle it out for third place, eagerly followed by the Netherlands, Austria, China and France. Most referrals to our blog come via Linkendin (maybe we should post there more regularly), followed by Google and the ROCAN website (on which we included a link to the blog only after a couple of months). The downside of the statistics is that one is also able to tell when a post did not gain as much attention as expected.
What were the most popular blog entries?
To be candid, sometimes we do not entirely understand why a certain post gains a lot or little traction (if there’s little interest, we blame it on the cover picture and choose another dog picture next time). Still, our most popular post was the one on the European General Court’s decision regarding Illumina/Grail, followed by our post on Germany’s FDI prohibition regarding the acquisition of Heyer Medical by Aeonmed. Other very popular posts were the one on the German election, our overview about Europe’s three most political transactions and our posts on antitrust and sports, which can be found here and here. Rather to our surprise, we received the most feedback on our antitrust trainings post. We were very happy about this, and we will continue to report on topics that are not purely legal from time to time.
Our goal for the next twelve months
The number one goal is to cash in and sell the blog to a large media company. Until this happens, we want to continue reporting on current topics. We will (or at least try to) inform our readers about the latest developments in antitrust and foreign investment control as well as about the corresponding political developments. We will also continue to be open for contributions from outside Germany for our series Antitrust and the Political System (or any other relevant topic), which will continue shortly.
A big thank you to all readers, subscribers and to everyone who reached out to us in order to provide feedback or to discuss our posts.
Stay tuned!
Paul, Timo and Tobias
Antitrustpolitics.com 