June was a bumper month for us with 117430 unique visitors, 229301 visits and 1685704 page views. In July, we were back around the sort of reader numbers we had for April with 89496 unique visitors, 195867 visits and 1442702 page views (as Kim noted, more than Andrew Bolt has….) and August looks like coming in at around the same numbers. The drop off from June coincided exactly with the start of the school holidays (and uni break) and then spiked up a little, before settling back down with the onset of the Olympics. More generally, and obviously there’s a tale there, my analysis of the detailed stats shows that we get a fair bit of extra traffic associated with sustained coverage of particular events or issues – for instance the federal budget, the 2020 summit, the Bill Henson photos controversy, the Garnaut Review report and World Youth Day. That seems to be people interested in those specific things, and where we are now is probably just below the usual level of general interest in what we write about – which garners us around 6200 visitors on most week days, and around 5000 on weekends this month. That’s about 1000 less than it was before school/uni holidays and the Olympics intervened.

There was some scepticism around last year that political blogs would not easily make the transition into the Rudd era, in the absence of the stimulus of the federal election, which is when our numbers really jumped to a level that’s reasonably significant. That concern can be set aside, because clearly we’ve maintained a steady readership at around the same levels throughout this year, and when there’s more focus and public interest on particular issues that aren’t being well covered by the mainstream media, we can pull in around 1000 more visitors a day, and sometimes more – there were quite a few days in July when we were getting visitor numbers in the high 8000s. Some of the traffic “base” if you like of all these numbers is the “long tail” – visits to old posts. But in general we’re getting each visitor looking at an average of 7.5 pages, which when you take into account the fact that a lot of the traffic from seach engines to older pages only goes to one post, means that a lot of readers are engaging with a lot of the blog when they come here.

I still think we can grow these numbers, and we haven’t had any income from advertising yet, so we haven’t been able to do our own promotion beyond what we usually do, but I’d be really grateful if folks who like the joint spread the word, and also very interested in feedback on the mix and quality of posts. I’ve said something about the mix here. That takes me to advertising revenue. Our net in June was $3910.06 but only $2153.93 in July. Astute readers of this post may have noticed that the number of page views dropped back by only about 15% while the advertising revenue fell by a much larger percentage. That’s the economy slowing! With consumer confidence falling, advertisers are spending less, and our broker has found it harder to sell space and is now selling space at a lower rate. So while things remain sluggish in the consumer sector of the economy, I think our revenue will stay at a much lower level than we’d anticipated, even if the readership figures return to their pre-school holidays dimensions. That’s a bit of a pity given that it constrains our ability to achieve the two aims we had for the revenue – promoting the blog, and compensating me for some of the time I’d otherwise be spending on paid work. But c’est la vie, and I guess we should put our faith in the Rudd government’s economic management competence.

If it persists though, we’ll have to have a bit of a rethink about what we can achieve in terms of outlaying money for marketing and promotion. So any ideas people might have about how we might do that for greatest benefit for smallest outlay would also be welcomed! And I, personally, will have to have a bit of a think about how I earn my crust after this semester finishes – because the lower amount of revenue will be the amount that flows through then given the four month lag between when it’s earned and when it’s paid. The PhD will be more or less wrapped up by then, fortunately, but I don’t think I’ll be doing the full time blogger thing in this economic climate. Though we’ll see!

I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone so much for their participation in and support of the blog. Our vision for LP has always been a community centred one, and I hope that we’re continuing to fulfil that. Any and all constructive feedback is most welcome.

Just a gentle reminder too that we don’t get any advertising revenue if you block the ads with a browser plugin. If that’s what you do, and you’d like to give us some financial support, we’d love it if you chose to make a donation!

And another reminder that the ad revenue isn’t dependent on click throughs – they’re display ads.