Scot Goes Pop: the fifth most-read alternative media site in Scotland?

Well, it's been several years since I last did a self-indulgent stats post, so it's probably long overdue.  I spotted that a few hours ago the Indyref2 site had compiled a list of "the top six alternative-media sites" based on traffic estimates from the helpfully-titled Traffic Estimate website. I was a bit surprised that Scot Goes Pop wasn't on it, because I knew from having looked into this subject in the past that this blog has very similar traffic levels to both Wee Ginger Dug and Indyref2. So I punched the Scot Goes Pop web address into Traffic Estimate, and found that, sure enough, it should have been on the list, just below Wee Ginger Dug but ahead of CommonSpace. Assuming nobody else has been accidentally left off, this is the correct top seven -

1) Wings Over Scotland: 215,900 unique visitors in the last 30 days
2) Craig Murray: 128,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days
3) Bella Caledonia: 112,200 unique visitors in the last 30 days
4) Wee Ginger Dug: 75,500 unique visitors in the last 30 days
5) Scot Goes Pop: 74,200 unique visitors in the last 30 days
6) CommonSpace: 59,800 unique visitors in the last 30 days
7) Indyref2: 30,800 unique visitors in the last 30 days

In all honesty I'm a bit sceptical about those figures.  I use Google Analytics, and the figures I get there are significantly less than an average of 74,200 per month.  Admittedly there's some traffic that Analytics doesn't pick up, but even so.  It's also intuitively difficult to believe that CommonSpace, a multi-author site that is updated far more frequently than Scot Goes Pop, and that gets free advertising on the mainstream media of the sort that the rest of us can only dream of, is only in sixth place.  Possibly the above figures are just ballpark estimates with a very wide margin of error.  Nevertheless, I can certainly believe that Scot Goes Pop is at least competitive with the likes of CommonSpace and Bella, which is pretty incredible for a one-man operation.

*Self-indulgent post ends*