Paul Staines writes the UK’s best-known independent political blog and he has had a good month. GuidoFawkes got 865,575 Views from 651,379 Visits by 118,151 Readers in February, despite it being a relatively quiet (and short) month.
Staines says he benefits from the entertainment value of fairly petty and personal campaigns against people like LabourList’s Derek Draper. These resonate to a degree with wider ‘issues’ but are not deeply momentous political stories in themselves. He has also done some excellent digging on corruption and freedom of information. Overall, no-one would deny that Guido is a significant part of the blogosphere and a lively part of the London political journalism ecosystem.
But what I was pondering was how you measure the impact and attention given to sites like Paul Staines’. One way is to measure ‘face time’. The stats appear to show that we are spending more time reading on each visit to journalism websites. That makes sense as I would guess that people are becoming better at working out where they get the information they want and so spend more time at each destination. I suspect that websites are also getting better at delivering the product to keep the visitor as a viewer.
Obviously, Guido’s figures pale beside that of mainstream rivals such as The Guardian which claimed more than 30 million users in January. But if you could break that down to consumers of Westminster political news then the figure would not be so far apart. And on top of that, I would guess that those people going to a specialist site like Paul Staines’ are somehow more ‘intense’ readers who pay more attention than old-fashioned newspaper readers and possibly even more than people who read mainstream media websites.
Of course, I don’t know that for sure, so I would welcome information from anyone who has done the research or wants to fund it! I think this kind of information matters as we try to work out the future role of online political journalism and the part it plays in public political discourse.
As a regular reader of Order Order I read it because the press and broadcast media with the exception of Private Eye simply do not cover news stories. It is one of the only ways to get real hard news and Guido makes it fun. Also the comments are so outrageous that if feeling splenetic you can anonymously bucket mouth anyone in the manner of the British CB Radio idiots. One day this will stop. But given we live in a fascist dictatorship rapidly approaching a Police State it is a miracle the site still exists. If you want my cv you will have to ask for it but middle aged middle class boilingly furious ex Tory searching for political truth may come somewhere near your needs.
From my analytics, the average reader:
* 1.40
Average Pageviews
* 00:02:25
Time on Site
You have to take the Guardian’s numbers with a lot of salt (in fact all the newpaper’s online numbers massively overstate the truth, something that the online advertising industry well understands). If you go to their site daily, say 30 times a month they call that 30 users. So divide their number by say 20 for regular readers and you actually get 1.5 million individuals, half of whom are yanks. Remove double counting for home and office and my guess is that three to five hundred thousand Britons visit their site over a month.
Once the Guardian did publish a number for “absolute users” for their http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics section of the website. It was 69,000. Not so impressive now is it?
In reality my estimate is that there are (outside election time) only 300,000 to 400,000 people actually that interested in politics in this country.
I think you will find that a great many individuals involved in politics (not just interested) regard Guido as required reading.
On the other hand, I can’t remember anyone saying to me ‘oh you must read the Guardian blog today’.
> But if you could break that down to consumers of Westminster political news then the figure would not be so far apart.
The Groan have been doing a sectional breakdown for at least 6 months. Catch up, Charlie 😉 Can I sell you a web analytics consultancy service 😕
They give the best information to the advertisers, but the process is not aligned with the ABCe setup – it is measured by Omniture from the client side rather than from logfiles on the server side. So the figures are actually quite comparable with political blogs – I did an analysis back in November here:
See http://tinyurl.com/groanwebtraffic
Guido>If you go to their site daily, say 30 times a month they call that 30 users.
Can you source that, Guido – I think you’re wrong on that one? The definition in the industry standard metrics they use from the ABCe staes that the stat is “de-duplicated” over the month.
See http://www.abce.org.uk/ABCE_PDFS/16007848.pdf
I would say, though, that ABCe logfile analysis overstates the Monthly Uniques number 2-3 times compared with Google Analytics, from my own comparisons.
The Guardian publish their politics section audience (you need to examine carefully just what they mean – excludes Society Guardian for example) here:
http://www.adinfo-guardian.co.uk/guardian-unlimited/traffic-users.shtml
Jan was 580k uniques / 1.43m page impressions in the UK, which is probably the best Guido comparison, since Order-Order only has a very small proportionally international audience (based on a compete.com USA figure of around 5k uniques per month – mattwardman.com is 10->20k by comparison on that compete,com measure).
On the “International Traffic to US Newspapers”, one interesting note is that the list of US papers you cite from Editor and Publisher is US papers only and they don’t say whether it is global traffic.
If they included British papers in that list, they would occupy 5 or 6 of the top 30 places for US traffic, never mind international traffic.
>Of course, I don’t know that for sure, so I would welcome information from anyone who has done the research or wants to fund it! I think this kind of information matters as we try to work out the future role of online political journalism and the part it plays in public political discourse.
Count me in if there is funding available, I’m surprisingly good value !
If it’s any consolation, I began blogging last year and now get 2300 visitors a day, reading for an average of 4 minutes
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s49friday
I don’t use google analytics so I can’t tell how many are unique, but it’s been two years since I bought a dead tree
Matt, I just don’t believe they are properly de-duplicated as they claim, nor does the advertising industry.
>Matt, I just don’t believe they are properly de-duplicated as they claim, nor does the advertising industry.
Thanks for your reply, Guido.
Fair enough if you’re just stating a strongly held opinion. I’d be inclined to suggest any problem was more with the difficulty of complete filtering – having played around with software certified by ABCe that filtered out far fewer search engines than I know about 🙂
In any case my parallel running of processes on the same data (25-30k uniques a month so *should* be a decent sample but maybe the wrong profile) says reduce ABCe uniques by around 50-70% to compare with Google. That doesn’t stop ABCe being compared with ABCe for different media sites.
The British National Party (BNP) is thrashing the mainstream parties – but only online. This says as much about the web as it does about politics, and I don’t think the mainstream should overdo its response. More……
http://paulseaman.eu/2009/03/the-web-suits-the-bnp-better-than-the-mainstream/
Guido Fawkes is very amusing, but more seriously, he is the Samuel Pepys of our age. He also is very generous about letting his readers leave their blog link on his site and so he shares his vast traffic with his readers. Many blogs do not allow this, so he is philanthropic as well as informative.