Though Cowards Flinch

At the turn of this month there was a little spate of leftist blogs saying how well things were going.  Phil at AVPS gave us an update on some steady growth, Left Outside told us it was going pretty well, and Sunny tweeted to reflect on the continued upward surge at Liberal Conspiracy, where hits now exceed an impressive 100,000 per month.

I was going to say something about the growing Though Cowards Flinch readership, but I forgot.  However, Comrade Dave has now twittered to say we’ve gone up the wikio ratings to what he describes as ‘mid-table’, and that reminded me.

I don’t know how to copy the graphs across to make it look all nice, and I’ve no idea how people can tell the difference between single hits and repeat visits and that kind of stuff, but I can tell you that the total number of hits increased from around 6,000 in August, when I started blogging here with Dave, to near 17,000 in January.   

While I’d like to think that the increase is partly because we’ve joined forces, Dave’s solo blogging was already gaining hit at more or less the same monthly, so it may be that my getting in the way has actually held him back.  If it has, he’s been very courteous about it.

So what to make of this growth in left blog readership?  

Well, in some respects, absolutely nothing at all.  As I set out here, just getting a few, or even a lot more people, clicking on your blog might be gratifying but that doesn’t necessarily translate into any kind of worthwhile action.  And, as has only happened on a couple of occasions here, the people who come to read do so not to engage with the discussion but to abuse you, it’s not even gratifying.  That’s just dull.

On the other hand, perhaps there is something in the fact that a group of blogs like TCF, Left Outside and AVPS are growing their readership fairly quickly, despite not really making any ‘concessions’ just to make that happen.  In addition, while I don’t have figures, I can be pretty confident that other new good ‘serious’ blogs like Paul Sagar’s Bad Conscience and, from the centre-ground-with-sense, Giles Wilkes’ Freethinking Economist, are buiding decent readerships.

All of these blogs remain fairly serious in content (the odd lapse excepted), aren’t afraid to get stuck in for a couple of thousand words if the mood takes us and the subject demands it. 

At TCF, we don’t generally just follow the story of the day, though we’ll pick it up if there’s a specific political/economic theory angle we want to take on it. 

And in general, our growth hasn’t come from increased links from the bigger, better known blogs; to the best of my knowledge we’ve never had a link from Iain Dale, for example, and the posts that Sunny cross-posts from here to Liberal Conspiracy don’t have an automatic link back to here. 

No, any growth we and our like(ish)-minded colleagues are generating comes down, mostly, to what we write and how we write it (though twitter links may have helped us, and our new TCF reader group may do some of the same.

Is our and our colleagues’ growth, then, an, indication that people are starting to look for blogs which offer more than Tom Harris-like tittle tattle and a feeling of ‘closeness’ to minor celebrity?  Is the blogosphere maturing?  Are there simple more people reading all blogs now, so that we’re getting a bit more overspill.

I’ve no idea really.  I’m not even sure I’m interested in the question, never mind the answer, though you can tell he what it is if you can be arsed. 

Come to think of it, this may be the most pointless post I’ve ever written.  Maybe this is the beginning of the end.