Reports of Nadine Dorries’s website traffic levels appear to greatly exaggerate the truth, but the Conservative MP has not been willing to put the record straight.
Earlier this month Bedford Today quoted Nadine Dorries as saying:
Having so many people visiting the site can be quite scary – according to Google I had 800,000 readers in July.
Google Analytics doesn’t provide a “readers” figure, and it’s therefore not clear exactly what her figure refers to (plus it is always possible either she made a slip of the tongue or the reporter got the phrase slightly wrong).
But let’s see how this figure might compare.
Both Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes publish monthly statistics from Google too. In July, Guido has 113,118 absolute unique visitors and Iain Dale had 59,441. 800,000 just doesn’t sound anywhere close to credible in this context: seven times as many as Guido, really?
Perhaps she really meant visits. I don’t have their figures for July, but I do have those for June: 476,745 and 303,890 respectively. Again, Nadine Dorries’s figure just doesn’t sound plausible. Do you really think she’s getting more visits than Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes combined?
In other words: the claim of 800,000 readers (or any reasonable variation on the term ‘readers’) looks to be wrong. I twice contacted Nadine Dorries’s office asking for an explanation or correction, once by email and once by phone, but have not received any response.
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14 Comments
Iain should have passed on some specifics when he taught her the trick of gaining a larger audience by pretending to be a massive one.
Is it possible that no one in the world could care less? Is the best way to spread the LibDem word really to snipe at Nodine Dorries’s website?
LDV regularly carries decent and important articles. Which makes this nonsense all the more frustrating.
Cheap lies undermine us all, Russ.
Several times I’ve had to remind Old Media types who sniff at this issue how seriously they take their circulation figures.
I’ve blogged on this here, Mark:
http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2008/10/gosh_i_wonder_w.asp
Any-one who cares about how MP’s conduct themselves will care. Yes it’s not explicitly important to Lib Dems but this MP is now basically an enemy to any intelligent person in the land.
I don’t think any MP – indeed, anybody – is “basically an enemy to any intelligent person in the land”. Nadine Dorries has illiberal views and loves to talk about them. So debate them with her, use these pages to show up the substantive faults in what she believes. Calling her The Enemy doesn’t help. Sniping about websites doesn’t help. Those things, in different ways, undermine us all.
Not sure if I agree with the wording myself, but I think you fail to see in what way she is being described as the enemy, Russ; she is either a shameless liar of a hopeless fantasist.
Her traffic claims are either a shameless lie or a hopeless fantasy, which helps to prove that.
Could it be that Tim is on her blog 25,000 times a day? That is the only plausible explanation for her site being twice as popular as her own party’s big budget, all singing, all dancing multimedia spectacular website.
The most popular Tory in the land is Boris, his webmaster says nowadays it gets between 30,000 to 50,000 page views a month. Draw your own conclusions.
Her views on gay people represent to me a form of hatred that is in line with racists, bigots and holocaust deniers. Are those people not enemies. In essence you are right it is the meme’s which are the problem, but to discredit those we must not put up with cavemanesque logic from some-one in public office.
Oh, hello Mr Fawkes/Staines. So are you here to actually call Nadine on her bullshit and maybe condemn her overstatement of statistics?
I think that political opinions are often very complex to express in full. They are nuanced and detailed. Sometimes LDV is a forum for exploring liberal beliefs in all this nuance, and I believe that’s when the site is at its strongest.
But someone like Nadine Dorries often takes the easier approach, and chooses to squash all nuance into pat ideas such as gay-is-bad, or abortion-is-evil. When liberals then call her The Enemy, we are lowering ourselves to her level. To some extent, by adopting ideas as basic as her own, she wins because we play the game by her rules.
No one who doesn’t already agree is going to persuaded by this rhetoric. It’s an absolute waste of time. You’re offended by someone’s illiberal views? Me too. Ignore trifles like her website traffic, and explain why it’s so important to disagree with her.
Fair enough, I’ll bear that in mind for the future.
“…I had 800,000 readers in July.”
Maybe she meant 30% of the 800,000 are fact, and 70% of the 30% are fiction?.
Obviously she means ‘hits’, the largest number in a traffic report. Last month the site I edit [Twickenham Lib Dems http://www.richmondlibdems.co.uk/index.html%5D had 2,000 unique visitors who paid 4,000 visits and looked at 13,000 pages; this amounted to 60,000 ‘hits’ [= a view or download of page or file].
If Nadine Dorris’ blog got 800k hits in a month, that’s probably a denial of service attack!