Monday, November 7, 2022

SimilarWeb Reality-Check for Stuart Campbell

For about the billionth time, Stuart Campbell has posted a comparison of the alleged readership numbers of the top pro-independence blogs and websites, supposedly to demonstrate what a miserable state the Yes-supporting New Media is in, but in reality to make yet another unsubtle boast about how his allegedly "closed" website is still leading the pack. (It's bloody peculiar that a self-styled "closed" website is regularly updated multiple times per month. Some might describe that as, well, y'know, rather an "open" sort of website on the whole.) I'm actually quite happy when he does this, because it helpfully confirms that Scot Goes Pop remains one of the top sites (and is competitive with multi-author sites such as Bella Caledonia, for example), but nevertheless I think the time has come to warn people that the data Mr Campbell is praying in aid is simply not reliable. 

I of course have access to my own private stats, both on Analytics and the Blogger platform itself, and they aren't even remotely reconcilable with Mr Campbell's numbers, which are taken from SimilarWeb. October actually saw the highest readership numbers for Scot Goes Pop since December of last year, but if you were to believe SimilarWeb, you'd wrongly think traffic had dipped to its lowest level for several months. Even more bizarrely, SimilarWeb claims that traffic was much, much higher in August than it was in September or October, which makes no sense at all, because I was barely posting in August.  My own stats show traffic was in fact 80% higher in October than in August.

The problem, of course, is that SimilarWeb does not have access to the real numbers.  It simply extrapolates from the browsing behaviour of its panellists, which will constitute only a tiny percentage of each site's overall readership.  If that by any chance produces figures that are "within the right ballpark", it can only be a very, very wide ballpark indeed.  Admittedly, some specific aspects of the SimilarWeb rankings seem intuitively plausible - I can imagine Wings may well be in first place and Wee Ginger Dug may well be in a strong second, but if we knew the real numbers, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the other rankings were very much wide of the mark.

I'd also be interested to know how SimilarWeb are counting "total visits", because if that isn't supposed to be synonymous with what we used to call "absolute uniques", ie. only counting each reader once per month, it may be giving a wildly distorted impression.  Wings has practically morphed into a readers' chat forum since its "closure", which means the same people are repeatedly "visiting" the same page over and over again to see if more comments have been posted.  To a lesser extent the same is true of Wee Ginger Dug.  That could be leading to a significant overestimate of the gap between Wings, WGD and the rest of the pack. (You might remember that back in the day Political Betting / Stormfront Lite was able to claim to be the UK's "most-read" political site due to its number of page views, even though Iain Dale had three or four times as many actual readers.)

I'd also just wryly note that Mr Campbell seems to have posted the SimilarWeb numbers for October almost instantly after they were published.  Is this the day he lives for every month?

UPDATE: I see SimilarWeb also claims that Wings Over Scotland has between 11 and 50 employees, is based in Glasgow (as opposed to, say, Bath), and produces annual revenues of between $2 million and $5 million.  Oh-kaaaaaaay...

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23 comments:

  1. I'm not sure what Campbell is talking about, even if his numbers weren't bollocks they'd show an indy blogosphere in rude health. The only fly in the ointment is that the top site has ceased to be an indy site in any true sense. My guess is Campbell will be on the No side in the next referendum.

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    1. No, he'll tell his sheep to abstain because 'what's the point of independence if women have beards' blah blah blah

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    2. Naw, he'll tell his sheep to abstain since women wie beards have become more important than a referendum. But they'll still vote for the only fly in the ointment to independence - the SNP

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  2. At first I was surprised to see Robin McAlpine's site isn't more popular but, as you say, the quoted statistics can't be considered credible.

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  3. Did he blow the $5,000,000 revenue on the Dugdale trial?

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  4. Gave up on his site ages ago - closed is closed imo - his big call was making a table of the irrelevancy of Scotland to British electoral outcomes - I had done the same prior to his sire but put it into the Scottish Independence Reference Library (we created that) on FB but to his credit he got people to sit up and take notice. One thing he never mentioned was that every time a Labour gov gets kicked out, it was followed by a huge tory landslide - that stopped with Brown / Blaair since they were essentially red tories and the electoral dynamic altered.

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  5. Yes, I've long suspected WOS's self-reported popularlity is inflated by the regulars' over-use of the refresh button.

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  6. "Bill Dunblane": Please note that the type of abusive comment you attempted to make on this thread will never be published on this blog (or if I'm ever able to revert to auto-publish - which frankly people like you are continuing to make utterly impossible - such comments will always be deleted as soon as I see them). I also take considerable exception to the implication that I'm lying in this blogpost - it may be possible to reasonably accuse me of many things but dishonesty about statistics is not one of them. I'd just note, incidentally, that the type of criticism and ribbing of your hero with which you seem utterly unable to cope without resorting to mindless abuse was self-evidently INCREDIBLY mild. You need to develop a sense of perspective, my friend, as a matter of some urgency. Or to put it another way, just grow up.

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    1. James, did you see the post on Wings a few weeks ago in which Stuart described a woman as "mercifully deceased"? (I think those were the words?) I don't understand why he still has any sort of fan club after an incident like that. These people need to take a long hard look at themselves.

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    2. Yes, I did see that and I was shocked by it. I didn't read the comments on that post, though, so I don't know if any of his followers tried to make him understand that he'd crossed a line. I wonder what Bill had to say about it (if anything).

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    3. Leeze Lawrence wasn't a woman, and he was a criminal scumbag.

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    4. Dear God. Whatever you may think about the person, would you agree that describing them as "mercifully deceased" is simply not on?

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    5. Even criminal scumbags deserve a life. That's why there is no death penalty here. Campbell got that one wrong.

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    6. No, I wouldn't agree. Nobody murdered him. He was an abusive racist drug dealer and the world is a significantly better place without him.

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    7. How brave of you to post such repugnant views anonymously.

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  7. Very informative post, James, thanks. The claims made on Wings didn't ring true somehow.

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  8. Campbell wants to eradicate the indigenous language of Scotland. His thinking is identical to that of a London imperialist. I doubt his belief in independence was ever genuine. Either way, the independence movement should have told him from day one to get lost.

    (PS. His views on Hillsborough are even more abhorrent.)

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  9. Now if I was a numpty I would say that there are 8 anonymous posters on this article who are all clearly unionists. But I'm not and I won't. Not really interested in that type of article from Campbell. If James says it's mince well I am happy to accept his research.

    Campbell is correct on many other points/articles and one example was on display today on the BBC's Politics Live. Kirsty Blackman is not well thought of by Campbell and I totally agree. Every time she turns up on the telly I squirm and pray please don't ask her an economic question on an independent Scotland. Thankfully that didn't happen today. She did, however, miss an open goal when the programme put up a graphic saying:-

    "Financial Times UK starts new round of licenses for North Sea oil and gas."

    More than 100 licenses. So Blackman is asked directly what she thought about this. Now she could have made the point that unionists said in 2014 that it was all just about finished and that they were clearly lying etc etc. The sort of thing an independence supporter might be focussed on. Instead we got waffle about " robust climate compatibility assessments".
    Bloody useless.

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  10. Sturgeon's gang will be spitting blood at Musk's new Twitter letting Campbell loose again. Fiona Robertson quick off the mark with her condemnation. Well done Elon - anything that gets wishy washy Wishart foaming at the mouth is fine by me. Just magic.

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    1. Pension Pete moaning his face off about Musk. I have no idea what he is worried about as he must have blocked about 50% of the Scottish population. Give him another 10 years of saying Indyref2 is just around the corner and the only people unblocked in Scotland will be WGD munpties.

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  11. Just because people read a blog doesn't indicate they actually agree or believe a word of what's written in it
    Campbell's problem is selling the notion that readers mean followers or supporters, it doesn't

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  12. Outrage. Absolutely diabolical outrage. Charlie boy missed by 4 eggs in York. Poor show by the perpetrator. It's an outrage that he couldn't hit him with 4 attempts. Also what did he do with the other 2 eggs in the box. Did he have them for his breakfast.
    No doubt the perpetrator will have a wee session on the rack in the Tower of London.

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