Indy news site & blog visit statistics for August 2021

A plot of selected well-known pro-independence site visit statistics from: www.similarweb.com.



Note the different scales for sites to allow comparison of trends. As a country-wide news paper, the National has a readership one order of magnitude greater than popular blogs, so cannot practically be scaled with these without a loss of trend resolution. 

A similar case applies for wingsoverscotland.com, where a comparison with the others must be treated with caution. Wings is unique in the group in that it is a UK-wide, English based site, with focus on Scotland, while the others are all Scottish sites. Statistically speaking, this means Wings has an ostensibly much larger audience base, i.e. that of the whole UK. At the same time, the site's anti-SNP / Scottish Green stance would also likewise be expected to draw in a significant unionist audience, contrasting the others, with the increasing exception of SGP, which has also become highly critical of the SNP recently. 

While some reduction in traffic post Holyrood election campaign is expected, and evident in all trends bar the National, data strongly suggest that those sites which have gone against popular Scottish opinion and began open attacks on the SNP / Greens while backing Alex Salmond's Alba, have lost significant readership as a result.

The site which has mounted the strongest attacks on the SNP / Greens - wingsoverscotland - has lost an enormous 75% of its March 2021 peak readership. While the site has taken a recent holiday from posts, this cannot explain the loss of traffic, as the bulk of this occurred before the Holyrood election when the site was publishing prolifically. It can only be concluded that the site has become very out of touch with its pro-independence Scottish readership, although is likely retaining a notable unionist following.  

SGP has lost 64% of pre-election peak traffic, although as a polling site, that could be simply explained in a large part by less public interest in the subject. However, the site is 35% down on the more 'baseline / out of election season' visit numbers seen prior to the Holyrood election campaign of 60k+/month; this dropping to 40k/month by August 2021.

WGD (290k) and the National (2.5m) show no evidence for any significant loss of traffic. The National continues to go from strength to strength over the longer term, while WGD appears to have settled into post-election fever stability, 19% down on campaign peak. The positive campaigning approach of these, with the union treated as the 'enemy' rather than other Yes parties, is very likely working in their favour. 

The trends seen are only to be expected, as blogs / papers don't shape public opinion, they just give a home to people of similar opinion. So if a site changes political allegiance, it will not automatically take its readers with it, but lose many of these. Moderation policies will also play a role; if people are prevented from posting because they disagree with the content of the site, they naturally will stop visiting. 



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