… We’d say a big thank you to the 19,655 ‘absolute unique visitors’* who read Liberal Democrat Voice in August.

This is our lowest readership figure of the year to date, down a notch on last month’s 22,000 – not surprising in a holiday month and when genuinely exciting political news is scarce. For the record, August’s 20k is still more than 50% up compared with the same month last year (13k).

This brings our absolute unique visitor readership for the last year to date (1 Sept 2008 – 31 Aug 2009) to 299,315, more than double the equivalent figure for 2007-08 of 147,363.

The 5 top-read stories during the month were:

1. Opinion: Getting ready for the next General Election by John Sharkey (5th August)
2. Open primaries: should the Lib Dems adopt the ‘Totnes model’? by Stephen Tall (4th August)
3. Unpleasant Tory campaign vignettes by Alex Foster (21st August)
4. Opinion: Misinformed populists spoil the exam results debate by Chris Ward (20th August)
5. The Pirate Party: the apolitical political party by Mark Pack (15th August)

Whether you’re a regular here, or an occasional ‘popper-by’, we’re delighted you looked in. And if you enjoy reading LDV, why not try writing for LDV?

* Google Analytics’ term: it broadly means people using almost 20,000 different computers visited LDV at least once. Some people may be counted more than once (eg, home and work computer),whilst some people may not be counted (eg, two different people use the same computer, or someone reads the site through a feed reader without ever actually visiting it).