I am aware that I sometimes write about statistics on this blog's performance, whilst suspecting that some readers are really not interested. However, when you write social media content because you want to change things, as I do, statistics do matter.

Three things surprised me over the weekend.

The first is that it became clear that sometime late yesterday, this year became the second most successful year in this blog's history. The number of reads exceeded 3.16 million, which was the previous second-best yearly total achieved, in 2020. But that figure for 2020 was for a whole year. The current data is for a half year. If the current pace continues, the annual total reads might well exceed 6 million views. The previous best was 2023, with almost exactly 5 million views.

Then, I noted that June was the best month ever in the history of the blog, with 610,000 views. I am not expecting that rate to continue, but the lowest this year is 445,000, in January, and since March no month has been less than 500,000.

Finally, I totted up the social media hits for the last seven days, which are:

• Blog, 150,000
• TikTok 165,000
• YouTube, 70,000
• Others (Instagram, podcasts) circa 10,000
• Twitter (X) 1,974,000

That is 2.37 million hits in seven days, helped admittedly by one very popular tweet, which has got 1 million hits. The average is 338,000 a day.

If the aim is to get a message out there, something is working.

Most especially, videos are working. After just three months of running them again, their reach is now higher than that of the blog itself, with very high follow-through watch rates of people actually viewing the whole thing once they have started, with the traffic increasing quickly. I am not presuming that this rate of growth will continue in the post-election period, but it seems that this experiment is delivering.