Mark Reckons - May STATPORN

Right, I will almost certainly regret doing this but I have decided to do a Statporn entry for May. I have not done one of these before, I guess because my traffic was fairly light (although steadily growing) but last month was incredible (for me anyway).

I never know which one of these is most important but I got 21,931 Pageviews from 16,534 Visits and a total of 13,355 Absolute Unique Visitors. As a quick reference, my figures for the preceding 5 months Pageviews (when I first really started blogging properly and started recording the Analytics) were:

December - 94

January - 704

February - 836

March - 1,392

April - 4,246

So steady growth, I guess as I have got better known.

The main reasons for such high traffic this month were the MPs safe seats and expenses correlation story that I broke on here which spanned a few posts, were linked to by lots of blogs and got me on Radio 4's "More or Less" (although I didn't get much traffic from the link they put on bbc.co.uk for some reason) and the post about my eye witness account from Andrew MacKay's Bracknell meeting that I attended and blogged about just before he announced he was standing down.

My top 5 blog posts with the number of page views were:

1) MPs Expenses and safe seats correlation - update (5,889)

2) I attended Andrew MacKay's meeting and I think his position is now untenable (5,287)

3) Has our electoral system contributed to the MPs expenses scandal? (1,675)

4) BBC Question Time Live Chat - 21st May 2009 (589)

5) "Gordon Brown resign" petition. Suspicious rate of increase? (412)

Top 5 referring sites were:

1) Order Order (4,645) - Thanks Guido!

2) Bad Science (998) - My science hero, Ben Goldacre linked to me

3) Iain Dale's Diary (957) - Iain linked to both of my main stories

4) Guardian.co.uk (826) - Polly Toynbee linked to the safe seats post

5) Twitter.com (587) - This is partly down to Ben Goldacre tweeting my safe seats post (and loads of his followers retweeting it)

With Lib Dem Blogs and Lib Dem Voice also bringing in traffic of over 500 each.

One of the reasons I hesitated before posting this is that I thought it might seem a bit self aggrandising and I really don't mean it to (not least because I am sure compared to many, these figures are quite low!). I just thought that people might be interested to see how after a few months of effort put into political blogging you can really start to get an audience for your work. Back last December I never would have imagined I could be getting so many people visiting me within 6 months.

The other reason is that I have now set myself a massive target for this month and unless I can break another big story (or two) it is a big ask! Still, you've got to aim high I suppose...

UPDATE: Edited to remove the Analytics chart as the resolution was rubbish and you couldn't read it!