Wings Over Scotland

Wings Over Scotland officially launched on the 1st of November 2011, with a collection of posts imported from a personal blog. (The first original post didn’t appear until a week later.) It was meant just to be a small aggregator site of interesting stories from the newspapers with a short bit of commentary. That month we had 6,290 pageviews.

We’ve grown a bit since then.

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…for us off their own bat this week, unasked. It’s pretty awesome, though we haven’t the slightest idea what we could use it for. (What it really makes us want is a snazzy 1cm-thick cutout metal version of the logo to use as a poker guard. Anyone?)

But when we have our own nightly current-affairs TV show on an independent Scottish Broadcasting Service, it looks like the intro is pretty much sorted. 🙂

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Alert readers may have spotted that today’s Sunday Herald features Professor Adam Tomkins and myself for its weekly “In The Hot Seat” interviews with opposing figures in the independence debate. The paper’s Investigations Editor Paul Hutcheon flew down from Glasgow on Wednesday, and we had an interesting and enjoyable two-and-a-half-hour chat on the subject of the referendum and politics in general.

Obviously it’s not easy to edit that down to a short 1,000-word article. But just for fun, I thought it might be enlightening to compare the content of the two columns.

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Readership stats for May, if you like that sort of thing.

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Readership stats for April, for those interested.

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The Glasgow Subway famously only ever goes round in circles, but that’s certainly not something you can say for Labour-run Strathclyde Partnership for Transport’s excuses for banning our adverts from it last month.

Because those are flying about all over the place.

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We didn’t do a stats post at the start of April (still just under 4m pageviews a month, if you’re curious) but when someone tweeted these figures this morning we thought they were worth a wee toot, because they’re more than just nice news for us.

They’re from the independent web-traffic analysis site Alexa.com, and they detail the relative rankings for the seven biggest dedicated Scottish politics sites on the web.

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Well, sort of, anyway. We were going to have another poll post tonight, but your eyes go a bit squiffy after an entire day of cross-referencing spreadsheets full of percentages so instead we’re just going to allow ourselves a wee brief glow of pride about this.

We hadn’t any idea the vote was taking place so we couldn’t even shamelessly urge readers to stuff the virtual ballot boxes, so we’re pretty chuffed to be sharing what we’re officially calling “joint 11th place” with some very decent reporters indeed, and to even be on the same list as the likes of Alex Thomson of Channel 4 and other people who get actually shot at for a living (instead of just on the internet) isn’t the worst feeling we’ve ever had.

And the fact that we’re the only other crowdfunded operation, along with the winner, means that you – Wings Over Scotland’s readers and employers – get the credit too.

Thanks to anyone who voted for us, and to everyone who’s helped make it happen.

If you haven’t seen them already, a few shots of our ads on the Glasgow Subway, paid for with a small slice of fundraiser money and pictured by some alert readers.

We can’t be certain, but we think this is the first time a news-and-commentary website like Wings has ever taken out real-world advertising anywhere in the UK.

See ’em while you can, though.

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February full stats. No comment.

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Someone just forwarded us the results of a survey by STV’s polling arm Scotpulse. It’s a “wordcloud” of the sort we have on this very site (it’s over on the right hand side and down a bit, marked “Tags”), where the more significant something is the bigger its name gets printed. It pretty much speaks for itself.

You’re the ones who put the word out there, readers. It’s working. Thank you.

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We’ve been talking about our own stats a little too much for our liking recently – we’ll give it a bit of a rest again after this month, honest. But this one’s kinda special.

Those are Wings Over Scotland’s lifetime stats – or at least, lifetime since we signed up to Google Analytics just under two years ago. And as of yesterday, they show that the site has been visited by more than a MILLION different readers over that period. And we’re damned if we’re not taking a moment to reflect on that one.

It’s been quite a ride so far. Let’s make it mean something.