Apologies for another self-indulgent stats post (in fairness I think the last one was in March!), but like other bloggers I do sometimes have to fight to make sure Scot Goes Pop gets the full recognition it’s due. Indyref2 have today published a ranking of Scottish alternative media websites based on monthly traffic estimates from the appropriately titled Traffic Estimate site. Scot Goes Pop is on the list in sixth place with 44,400 visitors, but that’s an underestimate because for some reason Traffic Estimate are now splitting the blog’s traffic between two domains – scotgoespop.blogspot.com (44,400 visitors) and scotgoespop.blogspot.co.uk (16,800 visitors). Given that we’re talking about unique visitors, can those two figures be treated cumulatively? Not necessarily – there may be a little overlap, although I strongly suspect that most people who visit the blog multiple times in a month do so on the same domain every time. So the correct figure is probably much closer to 61,200 than to 44,400.
When I first discovered Traffic Estimate a few months ago, the .com domain was showing zero visitors and the .co.uk domain was showing anything between 60,000 and 80,000 visitors. Why the flipover? I don’t really know, although one possible explanation is that Facebook links to Blogger now seem to be automatically directing to the .com domain, no matter which address is manually added.
I’ve also noticed that John Robertson’s and Jason Michael’s sites are missing from Indyref2’s ranking list. Assuming there are no other omissions, and assuming that other sites aren’t suffering from the same multiple domain problem, here is the correct top nine. I’ve put an asterisk next to Scot Goes Pop’s traffic to take account of the slight uncertainty over how to treat the cumulative figure.
Wings Over Scotland 211,400
CommonSpace 88,800
Wee Ginger Dug 80,000
Bella Caledonia 79,800
Scot Goes Pop 61,200*
Talking Up Scotland 59,000
Indyref2 48,600
Random Public Journal 42,200
The Ferret 42,100
Obviously these are very broad ballpark estimates, but if Scot Goes Pop really does receive in the region of 60,000 unique visitors every 30 days, what would that mean? It would suggest that getting on for 1% of this country’s entire population drops by every month. Not too shabby for a one-man operation. That being the case, it may be a good moment (ahem, cough, violent sneeze) to mention the ongoing fundraiser. I’ve been using last year’s fundraiser for the sake of convenience, although that may prove to be a mistake because a specific target figure can often be a motivating factor for donations. Basically you have to subtract £7800 from the figure on the page to calculate how much has been raised so far. That means just over £2000 has been donated in the current fundraising period, and a million thanks to everyone who has contributed. I have £7000 in mind as a very rough target, so that will be reached when the page says £14,800.
