How Bloomberg helped the SCOTUS blog

Keach Hagey of The Wall Street Journal writes Friday about how Bloomberg Law’s sponsorship of the SCOTUS blog helped it handle the overwhelming increase in traffic Thursday after the Supreme Court ruled on the administration’s health care laws.

Hagey writes, “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.'”

Read more here.