Thursday, January 01, 2009

December Statporn


601,082 Individual Readers in the Last 12 Months

Traffic in December was the second highest ever, with absolute unique visitors at 70,167. Year More than half a million individual people have read this blog over the last twelve months*

Year on Year Absolute Unique Visitors +32%
1 Jan 2008-31 Dec 2008 601,062 1 Dec 2006-30 Nov 2007 406,257

Absolute Unique Visitors +36% year on year
December 2008 70,167 - December 2007 45,075 - Nov 2008 64,552

Visits +39% year on year
December 2008 330,849 - December 2007 237,374 - Nov 2008 - 303,353

Page Loads +15% year on year
December 2008 476,397 - December 2007 406,257 - Nov 2008 432,211

Here are my top 20 linking sites (ie incoming hits) for December, according to Google Analytics.

1. - Guido Fawkes 27,001 (19,000)
2. - ConservativeHome 14,357 (13,700)
3. - Spectator Coffee House 13,496 (10,630)
4. - PoliticalBetting 8,607 (5,565)
5. +1 Dizzy Thinks 3,231 (3.055)
6. NEW The Corner 3,162
7. +1 Daniel Finkelstein & Red Box 1,995 (1,775)
8. -3 Biased BBC 1,749 (3,084)
9. +1 Obnoxio the Clown 1,666 (1,205)
10. -1 Ben Brogan 1,474 (1,221)
11. +1 Telegraph blogs 1,390 (1,120)
12. +4 Tom Harris 1300 (822)
13. +4 Daily Referendum 908 (781)
14. NEW Dave's Part 866 (-)
15. - Bob Piper 864 (764)
16. -3 Little Man in a Toque 858 (899)
17. NEW LibDem Voice 810 (-)
18. +1 Archbishop Cranmer 649 (709)
19. NEW NHS Blog Doctor 598 (-)
20. NEW Machiavelli the Prince 595 (-)

Some popular search phrases

"iain dale mp dies"
"premiership footballers naked"
"sexy msp"
"ed balls twat"

Source: All figures are from Google Analytics.

* Just to clarify, the figures in the annual figures yesterday missed out the last 12 hours of 31 December

9 comments:

Ralph Hancock said...

Well done, but enough lists already. The last substantial piece was on 30 Dec. Would be nice to have something to think about, even comparisons of the world of Das Leben der Anderen with our own plight (better electronics, no control).

Jeff said...

It's not so much that people are searching for such things that causes concern, it's the fact that these phrases are lurking on your blog somewhere that raises an eyebrow or two!

And sexy MSP? There's heaps of them of either gender, spoiled for choice we are up here...

Doktorb said...

I tried to watch my Christmas gift of Das Leben der Anderen but the darn thing is scratched...

I think "ian dale mp dies" is supposed to be "Ian Dale. MP Dies"...you've not quite got the Commons yet, Iain, never mind passed on to the (other) Other Place =)

Happy new Year :)

Chris Paul said...

There is something fishy about the annual absolute uniques versus the monthly figure. The former seems too high by far.

Is the annual one perhaps a sum of the 12 months' monthly absolute uniques?

I cannot believe the "churn" for your blog is so high that your annual uniques are just nine times or so your monthly figure.

That would mean most people don't bother coming back from one month to the next.

You are of course a blogging expert and will most likely have got the figures right. In which case I apologise but seek only an explanation for the lack of loyalty and persistence of your readers.

Chris Paul said...

That "just" is wrong. It should be "as much as" - the polar opposite of just.

Iain Dale said...

Chris Paul, there really is no hope for you is there? Are you accusing me of making these figures up? I would offer to send you a screenshot, but you'd no doubt accuse me of photoshopping it. Not that I can actually use photoshop properly, but I am sure that wouldn't stop you.

Tim said...

Iain: I fail to see why you insist on being so unfailingly petulant about such questions when it's your choice to continue parading these claims each and every month, but I can understand why you are so hesitant to offer screenshots, given the difficulty this has caused you in the past.

Chris: If you add the figures Iain has claimed for 'Absolute Unique Visitors' (not - I stress - any of his more creative interpretations of 'unique visitors') for each month over the past 12 months, they add up to 738,443. The figures that Iain could have presented himself (in less than the 5 minutes this took me) are presented below if anyone wants to check my sums.

jan 50,350 source
feb 51,293 source
mar 53,255 source
apr 61,008 source
may 71,877 source
jun 64,396 source
jul 59,441 source
aug 56,846 source
sep 67,494 source
oct 67,764 source
nov 64,552 source
dec 70,167 source

Total 738,443

Iain can also publish his bounce rate over the same 12 month period if he wishes to address CP's claims about churning. Of course, that bounce rate could be heavily influenced by readers' use of multiples IPs/computers, but the same could be said of the figure Google offers for unique visitors (which is superior, but not perfect) and it all raises questions about Iain's translation of this figure into "601,082 Individual Readers" this year (or "300,000 regular readers a month", depending on which version of his bio you happen to be reading) that Iain would probably rather avoid.

Iain Dale said...

Jesus Christ, here we go again. Just for you Tim, I have just put a screenshot of the annual figures. Happy? Thought not.

I cannot believe you wasted half an hour of your life putting those figures together.

Tim said...

It was only a suggestion, Iain... and I didn't say anything about wanting a screen capture.

So that's a bounce rate of 76.45% for 2008 according to the recently-published screen capture - thanks for that.

As I said, the figures took 5 minutes to bring together, and I did it not to 'get' you or 'get' CP but to establish the truth of the matter, as I knew the relevant data was this easy to find for me (if much easier for you).

It took me longer to write the comment than it did to crunch the numbers, and all of this was managed as a side task while animating. Not that any of this matters if you regard the pursuit of relevant facts to be a waste of time.

As for 'here we go again'...

a) See above, and note that I have countered CP's comment with facts that prove him wrong on the matter of addition.

b) That said, I will remind you that it is your choice to parade numbers monthly in the way you do, and you have to learn to expect the occasional query, especially when you have clearly taken one figure and presented it as another in the past and you have shown that you're not above querying statistics yourself.

And if I were going to pester you for statistics, it would be for the referral stats relating to your latest poll of blogs (and one site belonging to a friend of yours that isn't a blog at all). Calculating this myself from Technorati or Google Blog Search data would give me imperfect results and take me the better part of a day. You - the person insisting that the poll was from a balanced audience without providing any data to back it up - could provide much more reliable data in about 30 seconds. Should I waste my time by being more specific about the data/range I'm looking for, or would you rather keep this data under wraps?

PS - In a recent thread you claimed to only delete comments "which contain swearing or racist language." Did you know that idle blasphemy is widely regarded to be a form of profanity?