How do you know when you've scored a link on Tim Blair's blog?
You start getting comments like this :
But without the '..' of course.
Short attention spans are a curse when you're faced with more than a paragraph, or two.
Tim Blair appears to have a problem with this claim from a recent post :
This blog pulls anything from 1800 to 5000 individual readers per day, with about 80% of the readers coming from inside Australia.
Blair claims :
Of course, there’s always the slim chance Darryl is making things up.The "slim chance" is Blair's idea of sarcasm. This is the sort of slimy wording you use when you want to put forward an accusation but have no proof to back it up.
Here's visitors stats from Adsense for a recent average day for The Orstrahyun :
Perhaps Blair is troubled by the downward trend of visitors to his blog in the past ten months :
Or the fact that 79% of his readership now comes from the United States, while only 3% comes from within Australia (a few hundred most days when Andrew Bolt doesn't send over some traffic) :
UPDATE : It has been pointed out to me that the above pie chart may only represent the Australian readership of Tim Blair at a certain time of the day. Viewing the Sitemeter piechart over several days, at different times, shows Blair's Australian readership swinging wildly about. Sometimes it's 10%, other times as high as 40%.
But Blair's not alone in experiencing a dramatic drop in readership. It's happening all across the blogs that still champion Bush, find no fault in the Iraq War, actually believe that Islamists will find a way to over-run Western democracies and still cling to the belief the NeoCon swamp tide of death is the best thing that's happened to the world since the fall of European communism.
The rightoid blogs that helped Blair to find his large, mostly American readership - Powerline, Michelle Malkin, - have also experienced heavy losses of readership in the past year, as have many other attack blogs of the right, while 'lefty' blogs like Crooks & Liars and Think Progress have been steadily rising.
Blair's readership should, if anything, be growing by the day. He regularly picks up links from Andrew Bolt's blog, hosted by the Herald Sun and News Limited websites, two of the most heavily trafficked sites in Australia. Plus he gets a nice big plug for his blog across his Saturday full page column in Sydney's Daily Telegraph, a newspaper apparently read by more than 100,000 people.
If links from Bolt and a banner 'ad' in the Daily Telegraph won't drive up your readership, what will?
Or maybe Blair is just annoyed that he has been forced to hand around the bowl :
It’s the first selfish fundraiser in this site’s six-year life! Aims: replace the ancient laptop, set up a wireless deal, launch some cash at admin, pay off those damn bookies and get video happening.
Readers of The Orstrahyun should make a contribution if they can. It would be a loss to the Australian blogstream if Blair disappeared, or was unable to include videos of Kevin Rudd enjoying some ear fruit.
Blair continues to make a solid contribution to the growth of blogging in Australia, and remains one of our funniest and most precise bloggers, even if a disturbing number of his regular commenters revel in the untimely deaths of world leaders and celebrities, fixate endlessly on dreamed up 'lefty' conspiracies, have trouble expressing themselves beyond "you are a fuckwit c.nt" and enjoy fantasizing about how certain journalists should die or be killed.
Go Here To Read Darryl Mason's Online Novel ED DAY
you, sir, are a verbose f..kwit c.nt