Damn. That concerted Unionist smear campaign directed at us last month really hurt.
That’s 1,233,872 pageviews in April – almost quarter of a million up on the previous high, thanks to over 10,000 new first-time readers. We’ll try to struggle on.
Our survey of Scottish political website readership closed last night, and the results are in. And we must admit, we really didn’t see this one coming.
Remarkably, the winner of the poll – excellent news resource BBC Scotlandshire – was on 0 votes the day before voting closed, largely because we’d forgotten to include it. But to our surprise, in the small hours of the morning a whopping 1,011 votes arrived out of nowhere – or more specifically, according to our IP tracking, from a single building close to the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood.
When we checked, we found that it was the headquarters of a smaller and more amateurish news-reporting organisation, so we assume that lots of employees working the late shift had all decided to vote to express their admiration for a respected rival at once. (Curiously all from the same computer, and now we come to think about it, several hours after the poll had in fact closed.)
It’s quite the mystery.
Amazingly, it’s now been a whole year (plus two days) since we unexpectedly found ourselves top of a poll of most-read Scottish political blogs conducted by Scot Goes Pop. As we’ve now got a pretty sizeable readership, we thought it might be interesting to pick up the baton and conduct a similar survey for ourselves this year.
Below is a list of all the active Scottish political blogs we could think of. (We’ve been fairly liberal with the definition of “active”, hence the inclusion of LabourHame.) The criteria were pretty simple – the content of each site had to be chiefly about Scottish politics, and it had to be a proper website/blog (so we’ve excluded writers who are exclusively newspaper columnists with no site of their own, which knocked out the likes of Ian Bell, Alan Cochrane and Kevin McKenna). Facebook doesn’t cut it.
(We’ve included as many Unionist blogs/sites as we could find, but they’re remarkably thin on the ground, as we noted around the turn of the year. Even the once-tireless Councillor Alex “Braveheart” Gallagher has given up since last October.)
If you’re unfamiliar with any of the sites listed, you’ll find most of them in our links column over to the right. In the first poll (about which blogs you actually read on a regular basis in 2013) you can tick as many boxes as you like, and in the second we’d like you to choose your single favourite. Both polls close at midnight on Sunday.
We’ve received another letter from Ian Taylor’s lawyers. You can read it below.
We suppose we should thank Mrs Thatcher for giving us the last nudge over this rather special landmark, thanks to our second all-time-high pageview record in two days:
It seems fitting somehow.
So we weren’t sure what to do about our 1000th post. We toyed with the idea of making it a throwaway two-liner just for fun. We thought about a grand mission statement, but, y’know, it’s pretty obvious what our mission is so there didn’t seem much point. We considered a sort of “Greatest Hits” thing, but we basically did that last month. We were fairly sure we wanted a cartoon, though.
In the end, we decided there’d been enough navel-gazing already in the last month, and that it might be best just to make a quick point and then get back to work.
When you involve yourself in politics, the surest sign that you’ve got your opponents rattled isn’t that they start to copy you. It’s when they start to smear you.
Last night, an unholy alliance of prominent Labour and Tory activists (and some plain old-fashioned internet nutters) embarked on an extraordinary, co-ordinated and prolonged attack on Wings Over Scotland. We were accused of being liars, “needle-dicked fascists”, Nazis, misogynists, “sub-tabloid trutherists” (whatever the hell those are), “second-wave feminists” (ditto), “online vigilantes”, sectarian bigots (not sure on which side), “hate preachers” and probably of leaving the toilet seat up – it was hard to keep up with the sheer volume of abuse.
There were petty slurs on our professional standing and on where we live. We were, with no small measure of irony, accused of deploying “vicious personal invective”. It was the full kitchen sink of ad-hominem, as a frightened, panicky opponent threw everything they could think of in our direction.
We won’t delve any further into the details. The material outcome was the biggest influx of new Twitter followers in several weeks and a number of belated donations to our fundraising campaign, so that was nice. But what on Earth could have provoked such a poisonous and sustained onslaught?
Frighteningly, Wings Over Scotland is fast approaching its 1,000th post (likely to happen sometime next week). Sometimes, for unknown reasons, someone will tweet a link to an old story I’d forgotten I’d written, and I’ll click to see what it was and get enraged as if I’d never seen it before and was just discovering it now.
So. Wow. Where to start? Lead with the number, we suppose.
Did we say “Wow” yet?
Wings Over Scotland readership stats for February. Click to size-up.
Bullet points below for fans of blatant self-aggrandisement.
We’ve had quite a jolt this afternoon, readers. The New Statesman has just posted a story proclaiming itself “Britain’s biggest political website”, citing impressive figures of 1.15 million unique users per month and 3.35m pageviews.
We clicked on the story (from a tweet) because we thought there must have been a typo – 1.15m is close to 40 times as many readers as Wings Over Scotland, yet 3.35m pageviews is only about four times what we get. But the story backed up the numbers, and provided a few more for comparison:
New Statesman: 1.15m users, 3.35m views per month
Guido Fawkes: 468K users, 2.34m views
The Spectator: 350K users, 2.5m views
Iain Dale’s Diary: 235K users, 409K views
These are the sites suggested by TNS as the UK political blogosphere’s big hitters, along with some others it didn’t give figures for. But that wasn’t what had us rubbing our eyes and doing a double-take.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
