VoxEU.org is one year old
One year and 444 columns later, Vox celebrates its first birthday by introducing new features including audio interviews with Vox authors, a conference and workshop listings service, and a weekly newsletter.
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One year and 444 columns later, Vox celebrates its first birthday by introducing new features including audio interviews with Vox authors, a conference and workshop listings service, and a weekly newsletter.
VoxEU.org is celebrating its first birthday today.
Vox’s goal is to raise the level of the policy debate by making it easier for researchers to draw out the policy implications of their research and to make their work more accessible to professional economists in public and private sectors, academics, and journalism.
Great columns on monetary policy and on international tradeWe started the birthday celebration with last week’s line up of columns on central banking by several of our most popular “Vox Stars”:
This coming week is focused on trade and will feature columns from popular Vox columnists including
We are introducing new features:
Expect more features at the end of the summer.
Vox’s supply-side successVox’s clearest success has been on the supply side. Its goal is to make it easier for researchers to draw out the policy implications of their work in a setting that is more informal than scientific journal articles, and less constrained than newspaper columns, but longer and more structured than a blog post. Moreover, the permanent URL makes each column a durable and Google-able entry into the evolving public debate.
Over 550 economists have written columns for Vox in its first year including some of the profession’s academic greats such as Daron Acemoglu, Alberto Alesina, Tim Besley, Jagdish Bhagwati, Olivier Blanchard, Alan Blinder, Esther Duflo, Francesco Giavazzi, Charles Goodhart, Robert Gordon, Nobel laureate James Heckman, Paul Klemperer, Paul Krugman, Lisa Lynch, Andreu Mas-Colell, Ken Rogoff, Sir Nicholas Stern, Guido Tabellini, Jean Tirole, Michael Woodford, and many more (see the full list here).
Demand side successSince its audience is trained economists rather than the general public, the numbers are modest by web standards. Currently, Vox current receives over 10,000 unique visitors a day as calculated from the server log file (from almost a half million distinct IP addresses); the average number of page views is about 35,000 per day (7.3 million in total). The readership is growing steadily, having tripled since August 2007.
As Figure 1 shows, half the readers (or at least their servers) are in the US with big four European nations accounting for another quarter. Vox does not yet do well in Asia: only about 1.4% of the readers are located in Japan and the same in China; all Asia accounts for just 5.6% of the readership.
Consortium.Vox is in a consortium with Lavoce (Italy), Telos (France), Sociedad Abierta (Spain), Me Judice (Dutch) and we are working on a German partner, so the best contributions are translated into the all the languages (each site decides what to translate). This ensures that good, research-based policy commentary and analysis reaches much deeper into the world’s policy-making machinery than is the case for a newspaper OpEd piece or the average blog post.
Figure 1 Geography of VoxEU.org readership