So, it’s our birthday. It was exactly four years ago today, on the 7th of November 2011, that Wings Over Scotland published the first post of what was supposed to be a pretty insignificant spare-time blog picking out interesting politics stories in the day’s Scottish media and challenging any inaccuracies in them.
It got a bit out of control, frankly.
Another three months have come and gone – where does the time get to, eh? – so it’s time for a quick Wings readership-stats update. There’s nothing particularly interesting or dramatic about them, so we’ll just give you the numbers and move on.
UNIQUE VISITORS IN OCTOBER 2015: 293,793
PAGE VIEWS: 4,616,334
In what’s been mostly a very sleepy time for politics, we’re thrilled with that.
Alert readers of The National will have noticed an article by me in it today. It reads slightly weirdly, jumping from subject to subject, because it was originally done as an interview but they then decided to cut the questions out to get more text in.
That’s all absolutely fine – they okayed it with me first – but some readers may be interested in seeing the full original piece, which is about twice as long. If you are, you can read it below. If you’re not, um, do what you like. I’m not your mum.
Nobody else is going to do this, so we’ll do it ourselves.
For reasons best known to himself, and almost certainly NOT related to the recent publication of his new book, the BBC’s Nick Robinson has today chosen to reignite the issues surrounding his infamous questioning of Alex Salmond a week before last year’s independence referendum, claiming that the reaction to his presentation of the incident was reminiscent of “Putin’s Russia”.
The state broadcaster’s political correspondent then inflamed social media further by claiming on Twitter that a grassroots protest – neither instigated nor endorsed by the SNP or Yes Scotland – outside BBC Scotland’s headquarters in Glasgow a couple of days later was in fact organised by “a governing party”.
(Robinson also claimed the mob had been 4000-strong, although the BBC’s own report had put the figure at “up to 1000”. The demo was sedate and entirely peaceful – no arrests were made, nobody was hurt and no damage was caused.)
The footage showing that Robinson had lied on air about his encounter with Salmond was captured and published by this website, in a pair of videos which garnered well over 600,000 views on YouTube and one of the most-read posts in Wings history.
When we mentioned that fact earlier today, a reader asked what other posts were in the top 10. So we looked, and noticed that the biggest ones had a common theme.
It’s three months since our last traffic-stats update, so we’re due again.
WINGS OVER SCOTLAND JULY 2015
Unique users: 308,314
(up 20,626 on June 2015, up 79,159 on July 2014)
Visits: 1,147,571
(up 90,453 on June 2015, up 229,604 on July 2014)
Page views: 4,732,038
(up 94,495 on June 2015, up 498,717 on July 2014)
We’re not due a traffic post this month, so we’ll just leave this here.
(From a new Panelbase poll. More findings coming soon.)
We’re only doing stats posts quarterly now, but since the last one we ran was for the January readership figures that means it’s time for a quick update.
Almost 23,000 extra readers compared to last month and nearly 600,000 more page views? Yeah, we’ll take that. (For perspective, here’s April 2014.)
Perhaps we’re just being over-sensitive, readers, but we think the Daily Record might be a little bit upset with us.
That’s the editor of the semi-popular Scottish Labour fanzine, Murray Foote, pictured above this afternoon apparently issuing his own very special honours list, but it’s not the crankiest thing the Record’s published in the last 24 hours.
You can never accuse the Scottish media of being knowingly underhysterical.
Tonight the Daily Record snuck out its semi-apology for telling the Scottish people the biggest lie we’ve seen on the front page of a newspaper since its parent the Mirror published fake pictures of soldiers urinating on Iraqi prisoners.
You can tell they’re not awfully pleased we forced them to make that “correction” by reporting the lie to the Independent Press Standards Organisation, because they even reference it in the editorial above.
Speaking of which – well, heck, where do we even start?
We haven’t done a monthly stats post for a few months, partly because naturally traffic’s been down after the insane spike of last September, partly because we had two weeks off in October (and a semi-break over Christmas and New Year), and partly because we’ve moved to new, more accurate and more detailed figures direct from our webhost and January was the first full month of them.
So here, for those of you who like to keep track, are the headlines:
We’re pretty blown away by that, to be honest. A tiny fraction shy of 300,000 unique readers (in what’s traditionally a very slow month for politics, and one we didn’t really start until the second week) is 157% up on a year ago, and nearly 50,000 higher than last May, which was the all-time high until the mad last few weeks of the referendum campaign. (It’s the 3rd-highest ever, after September and August 2014.)
If you’d told us we’d be anywhere near those sorts of numbers four months after a No vote (or indeed if we’d even still be going four months after a No vote), we’d have said you were missing a few marbles. But as long as you’re still here, we will be too*.
Alert readers may recall this baffling story from last month, in which we discovered that Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie hadn’t been able to think of any more pressing issues to occupy himself with than finding out how many times Scottish Government civil servants had accessed Wings Over Scotland in the six months leading up to the referendum.
So we were intrigued when we got an email from a viewer who just for fun had sent a Freedom of Information request to Holyrood and asked them the same question for the official Scottish and UK Liberal Democrats websites. The results are below.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
