The curious case of Nadine Dorries’s website traffic

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?.

  • Ian Eiloart 27th Oct '10 - 9:24am

    If Nadine Dorris’ blog got 800k hits in a month, that’s probably a denial of service attack!

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