What I wrote at Lib Dem Voice

October 09, 2006

The figures that prove how brilliant this blog is

I understand it’s become the custom on some blogs to note how many readers visit. As if size matters. It all seems terribly un-English to me. But if you can’t beat ‘em…

Here, then - in the spirit of full disclosure - are my user stats. The left (y) axis is the number of unique users, the bottom (x) axis is the year:

As you can see, I started from a low base, as I hadn’t in fact dipped my toes in the blog-water in 2004.

In the circumstances, therefore, I’m perfectly content that attracting zero visitors was as good as I could realistically have hoped for.

(It’s always good to have a stretch figure, but it should be seen as just that.)


The next year, 2005, is harder to explain. Apparently, half a unique visitor viewed this site. (My StatCounter does, naturally, have a 'blocking cookie' to avoid totting up my own visits here. Otherwise this graph would be well into seven figures.)

I suspect either someone very short, or very young, must have visited very quickly.


Of course, the past month has seen this blog attract a decent amount of media exposure, which has perhaps skewed my 2006 figures to a record-breaking three unique users. Two of these are my parents, who didn't know about it before (which was the way it was meant to be).

But that I now have one regular unique user per year outside of my family suggests to me that this blog is on the up. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that its reach now exceeds its grasp. At this rate of exponential growth, I will overtake Iain Dale within 10 years.

Blogging really is the future.

6 comments:

Nich Starling said...

Well done. Very funny indeed.

I know what you refer to as someone else contacted me and said Iain Dale was showing his stats off on his blog.

The "look at my stats everyone" thing is a bit like saying "look at how big my penis is"

Anonymous said...

It's a two horse race! Only Stephen Tall can win here!

Stephen Tall said...

In fairness to Iain (treasure those words), newspapers do this all the time. And if I had Iain's ratings my outlook might be rather different.

As for a two-horse race, my bar chart ain't great for the 'squeeze' message.

Anonymous said...

are you coming round for tea on sunday? Mum.

Anonymous said...

Well done Stephen. How many of those hits are for zero seconds because you came up in a Google search but noone actually looked at your page?

Guido Fawkes said...

Look at MY BIG PENIS!