Wings Over Scotland

Tory commentator* David Torrance was a little mean about us on Twitter last night, but we won’t hold it against him. As a ubiquitous cross-media Scottish pundit, though, we’re a bit more concerned about his journalistic diligence and grasp of arithmetic.

The bespectacled biographer appeared on the evening’s edition of Scotland Tonight, and tweeted a question about the preceding interview with Blair Jenkins, in which the Yes campaign chief had claimed to recall opinion polls in recent years showing a majority for independence. Helpfully, we sent over a link, annotated with details of several that fitted the criterion of a higher Yes vote than No vote.

But it turns out that according to Mr Torrance, getting more votes than the only other option in a two-choice referendum doesn’t count as a win.

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As we predicted a month ago, we’re a little down on page views for December (by just under 9%) on account of the festive break. Instead, then, we thought we might take a couple of lines before 2012 slides into oblivion to briefly look at Wings Over Scotland’s stats for the entire year, minus these last few hours.

150,384 unique visitors
602,805 visits
2,738,618 page views

Seems not too shoddy from a standing start, if we say it ourselves. We’ve got some big plans lined up for 2013, so don’t go anywhere, folks. Thanks so much to all of you for reading, commenting and contributing this year – we’ll see you on the other side of some 10-year-old Macallan. Slainte!

Despite slightly fewer posts last month than the preceding one, Wings Over Scotland still entered its second year by hitting another new all-time pageviews record in November, with an increase of nearly 25,000 to 429,114. The more telling statistic, though, was the number of unique users, which rocketed by a whopping 24% as almost 5000 new people came to visit, bringing total readership past 23,000.

(We were going to stop doing these every month, but with December’s figures likely to take a fall due to the Christmas break, we hope you’ll forgive us one more moment of self-congratulatory horn-tooting while we’re still on the upslope.)

It also seems a good time to remind you that we’re always on the lookout for features to draw even more readers in. In 2013 we’d like to broaden our contributor pool a bit and add some more names to the excellent talent we’ve already been proud to showcase. 2012 has seen a dozen people other than myself notching at least one WingsLand byline, and we want lots more voices next year. If you’ve got something to say and you want tens of thousands of people to hear it, you know where to reach us.

Crivvens. We were rooting around in Google Analytics (the thing that records website traffic) today. It’s a service we only signed up to at the start of March, which among other things means our cumulative lifetime pageviews statistic is probably understated by around 100,000. But the startling thing we discovered was something else.

Since we started tracking “unique visitors” in March (statspeak for the number of different identifiable people who’ve come to the site at least once), Wings Over Scotland has been read by just over 125,000 people. That’s… wow. That’s a lot.

Obviously many just pass through after following a link from somewhere and never come back, and a typical single month will only see about a fifth of that number, but around 80% of our readers each month are return visitors – increasingly, people who come here once come back again. (So once more, we’ll be making no apologies for publishing the occasional story about Rangers when merited…)

That’s not just down to the editorial contributors – we’re proud to have some of the most informed commenters in the blogosphere too, who not only tip us off to stories worth covering but also provide new angles and ways of thinking about stuff that hadn’t occurred to us. So if you’re one of the 99% who read but don’t comment, speak up. We, and an increasingly large number of other people, want to hear from you.

It’s got flowers on it and everything.

Gemma Fox is a rather strange lady who makes Lego dioramas of Royal Marine Commandos and who we had a childish but enlightening recreational argument with on Twitter last night. (Funnily enough after a long and tiring day visiting the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton.) James Mackenzie is a Green activist and one of the editors of the once-popular and increasingly-ironically-named Better Nation blog.

(Mackenzie threw an impressive hissy fit earlier this week when we very politely challenged him to support a seemingly-baseless allegation about another blogger, even going so far as to claim “harassment” on the basis of someone responding civilly to comments made in an open public forum. Presumably, as a Better Nation editor he’s just not used to people answering him back without being able to censor them.)

Ms Fox generously warned us last night that we had until “2000 hrs” this evening to delete unspecified tweets from our account, and that we should also “warn yer pals”. (We’re not quite sure who that means, but it might be you, so we thought we’d better let you know.) If we vanish suddenly at 8.01pm under legal action – the threat of which we’re sure is real and serious, and definitely not just the mad rantings of a delusional internet lunatic – speak kindly of us when we’re gone. We had a good run.

Crikey, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? Wings Over Scotland is a year old today. The site was created on the 1st of November 2011 with the import of a clutch of Scottish-politics posts from my personal blog, though it didn’t go properly officially public with an original post of its own until a week later. And jings, readers, what a birthday present it is you’ve given us:

Click on the image for an enlarged version showing all the stats. The site’s pageviews increased by a staggering 53% last month, and the number of unique readers by 54%. October 2012 was also the first time we’ve attracted more than 100,000 views in a single seven-day period. We’re gobsmacked.

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We apologise for running two horn-tooting stories in one week, but we’re blown away, we really are. Back at the start of August we predicted, in all sincerity, a big drop-off in pageviews for this site, because the June and July figures had been inflated by a hefty sprinkling of Rangers stories as that particular circus ricocheted between slapstick and farce on an hourly basis. We were linked from many dozens of different football sites and forums as far apart as Inverness and Portsmouth, and thousands of readers with little to no interest in Scottish politics arrived for a brief visit.

There was indeed a fall in August as we stopped covering the Great Govan Debacle, but a much tinier one than we’d anticipated – just 4% (and more on that in a moment). And this month, to our considerable amazement, we’ve not only recovered the losses but hit another record high: up over 15,000 to 265,203. We only broke the million-views barrier in August, and in September (albeit the 29th) we passed 1.5 million. Wow.

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The last seven days have been the biggest week in the history of Wings Over Scotland, eclipsing even any of the ones at the height of the Rangers fiasco. The site saw a total of 86,522 page views over the period – 15% up on the previous best – in a historic week which also saw us break the 500-posts and 10,000-comments barriers.

So thanks to all of you for reading and sharing, thanks to everyone who marched for independence in Edinburgh last Saturday, and most of all, our very special thanks to Johann Lamont. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Never slow to jump on a bandwagon, Wings Over Scotland would like to announce, after endless media speculation, a long-awaited rearrangement of our popular and much-used links column. We like to keep our blogroll relatively lean (with at most 20, 10 and 5 links per section), because when you link indiscriminately to everyone you might as well just have a single button that leads to Google. We also sigh when we see blogs linking to long-dead sites that haven’t been updated in months or years, or even ones that have been outright deleted. Quality, not quantity, is our benchmark.

Brand-new faces include National Collective (Scottish Politics) and Political Betting (UK Politics). Despite misgivings about the character of their proprietors in both cases, both are valuable and admirable resources. Our other debutant is Mark Steel, whose concise and biting satirical columns in the Independent rarely reference Scotland (and so find themselves in UK Politics), but are unmissable reading all the same for those troubled by the thought that the neoliberal consensus has consumed England entirely.

Returning from exile is Scotland’s finest newspaper journalist Iain Macwhirter (Scottish Politics), after a long period of silence saw his personal blog excised from the list. Lesley Riddoch has fallen by the wayside to make room, not due to any decrease in the merits of her postings but to a marked drop in their frequency, as well as the fact that they can almost all be read in the Scotsman anyway. (For similar ubiquitousness reasons, Gerry Hassan steps aside for the Jimmy Reid Foundation.) We prepare ourselves wearily for the imminent assault on our gender-balance shortcomings.

Meanwhile, in the customary shock promotion, an outbreak of considered and intelligent commentary sees Kevin McKenna elevated, for a probationary period, from Zany Comedy Relief to the Scottish Politics section. (We hope this recategorisation might also persuade Mr McKenna to desist from the “comedy” pieces he occasionally attempts. They are not, and let’s put this delicately, his strongest suit.)

Filling his place in the ranks of the Nutjob Squad is inevitably the increasingly-tragic figure of Ian Smart, for whose ability to function in society by the time the referendum comes round we seriously fear at the current rate of deterioration in his sanity.

We’re still actively seeking sites of considered and worthwhile Scottish debate from a Labour perspective – including Unionist ones – which might reach the same heights as the Tory-leaning Alex Massie in the Spectator (whose features, even when we fundamentally and vehemently disagree with their ideology and content, are almost always thoughtful and well-sourced), but the substantial percentage of previously-unrepresented Labour voters who do back the Yes campaign are now represented by Labour Voters For Independence (Scottish Politics). We’ve chosen their more active Facebook page over the actual website.

If you know of a regularly-updated site – of any political persuasion or none – of serious analysis and comment with regard to Scottish politics, that we’re not currently featuring and should be, let us know.

We expect next month’s Wings Over Scotland viewing figures to take a pretty big fall, as politics will still be on holiday and there won’t be any more stories about the Rangers saga to fill the gaping NewsChasm (tm) left by the summer “silly season”. So we hope you’ll allow us this toot on our stat-trumpet before the inevitable slide.

July saw yet another record-smashing month for the blog, piling almost 40,000 page views onto the previous high – a 17% increase – and boosting the number of unique visitors by an even more startling 27%, to just shy of 30,000. The running total of 986,764 pageviews since we started nine months ago means that in August we should at least be able to boast of breaking through the 1-million barrier well within our first year, which will be some small degree of consolation.

It’s traditional at this point to cough modestly and hopefully towards the “Donate” button – we’ve got just about enough cash from generous viewers now to get on with moving to a more robust server, under our “official” domain name that won’t see the blog blocked for some readers for having “game” in its address – but mostly we just wanted to say thanks once more to the people who are increasingly making Wings Over Scotland their first stop for Scottish political news with just slightly too much focus on football. We’ll try not to let you down.

We’ve noted before that it’s flattering to see the grown-up media pinching this blog’s stories. Sometimes it’s possible to put it down to innocent coincidence, such as the Guardian’s report today on the sweatshop conditions of workers producing London Olympic mascots – something Wings Over Scotland readers were reading about almost a month ago. At other times, though, the plagiarism is rather more obvious.

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The records have been tumbling like skittles at Wings Over Scotland – we’ve just notched up our biggest day of page views ever (last Friday), our biggest week, and our biggest month. Especially heartening was the fact that no single post provided more than 18% of the traffic for any one week, or more than 6% of views for the month – we were already comfortably through the 200,000 barrier even before Friday’s popular and widely-linked piece on the SFL’s farcical “reconstruction” proposals.

We also smashed the 1000-Twitter-followers barrier (despite a furious Twitstorm from No campaigners last Tuesday), set a new high of almost 23,000 unique users, and exceeded 50,000 visits for the first time. Thanks so much to everyone who’s come to the site, and particularly to those who’ve tweeted links, posted Facebook likes and all the other stuff that’s helped our readership grow by 1,675% since the turn of the year.

Now for the (slightly) bad news.

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