2023 Site Review

Bring Back Universal Analytics!

This post presents site data for 2023, but before I start, there is some disappointing business to relate.  During 2023 Google Analytics shut down its previous version, which had been faithfully recording data here since 2013, and switched to a new version called Google Analytics 4.  As best I can determine GA-4 is in some respects terrible, or if it isn't terrible in these respects, working out how to quickly make it work like the old version is beyond me.  (The full transition to the new version involved instructions that were way beyond my understanding).  In particular, from Oct 5 onwards, I lost the obvious ability to track unique pageviews, which were defined as "the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once".  Unique pageviews was a very useful statistic to capture whether users were visiting the same page over several days, without also capturing whether they were hitting refresh repeatedly during live coverage.

I was very familiar with the way the previous version worked, and another result of the switch to the new version is that I can no apparently longer directly compare the interest levels in specific articles from this year onwards with articles from previous years.  

Do tech corps that make changes like this even bother to think or care that they might be disrupting the continuity of someone's experience, and damaging their enjoyment of the service?  

Anyway, on with the show as best I can.  The activity graph below shows the total number of users visiting per week.

The biggest spike in late March is for the NSW state election, followed by the Voice referendum in late October.  There are also some small spikes including for the Fadden by-election (Aston is mostly lost in the NSW spike).  There was a generally fairly high level of interest leading up to the Voice after a quiet start to the year.  Overall I estimate traffic was down 52% on 2022 (which was the site's biggest year to date), still making it the sixth biggest year so far, which isn't bad at all given that 2023 contained neither a Tasmanian or a federal election.  Indeed 2023 just beat 2021 which had a Tasmanian state election.

In 2023 I released 66 articles (down 28 on 2022 and the second-lowest for a completed year so far).  But this was more than I expected at the start of the year, and at some points if I had had nothing else to do I could have easily written an article every day.  For what was on paper a quiet second half of the year there turned out to be a lot to talk about, especially because of the richness of polling for the Voice referendum.

Major subjects for the year were the Voice referendum (12 articles) and the NSW election (10).  There were five Not-A-Poll resets for departing leaders and five articles for the Tasmanian Legislative Council races.  January was the first month with no articles in the history of the site, as a result of moving house and a major field trip.

Forgotten dreams

I typically list all the stuff I didn't get around to finishing and releasing here (sometimes pieces in this list get written later, and often they get incorporated into later pieces - but some things I decide aren't worth the bother).  For 2023 there was quite a bit of it, here are most of the titles:

"Truth In Electoral Advertising" Is Overrated

The Voice Referendum: Some Comments On The Failed Attempt 

Malapportionment And The Voice

There Is No Two-Party Swing In Warrandyte And It Is Not Now A Safe Seat

A DD That Would Detonate The Greens? That's Dubious

If A Branch Falls In The Forest: North-East Tasmanian Liberals Chaos

Labor MP Dan Repacholi Blocks Me On Twitter

Oceans Apart: Why Is Resolve Diverging, But Not At Election Time?

The "3 out of 10 Voted Labor" Furphy

The 2022 Election and Polling History

The leaderboard (I think)

Because neither the Users stat nor the Views stat capture what I want in terms of an article's level of attention, I've come up with a compound stat that approximates Unique Views for most articles, this being Users + (Views/4).  On this basis the following were the ten most visitied articles:

1. Australian Polling Denial And Disinformation Register

I got fed up with the sheer level of poll denial that the Voice referendum was generating and wrote a resource piece to cover and debunk polling denial tropes often spread on social media.  Twice as many users visited this piece as any other this year, but it had a low rate of re-visits per user.  This may have had something to do with the link to it being included in at least 214 different tweets, mostly me using it to thwack usual suspects with the facts.  

2. Aston By-Election Live

Live coverage of the historic federal by-election in which a government won an opposition seat for the second time since Federation and the first since 1920.  The Liberals did well in the first booth to report, and then badly in all of the rest.  

3. 2023 New South Wales Postcount: Legislative Council

Postcount coverage and modelling for the NSW Legislative Council race.  This was less complex than in 2019, both because of a simpler system for throwing votes in the initial count and because the eventual contest was basically a two-party race.  In the end the Coalition defeated Animal Justice for the final seat.

4. 2023 New South Wales Postcount: Classic Seats And Kiama

This piece followed the Coalition vs Labor type seats in the NSW election postcount.  Initially Labor looked very likely to win a majority but it turned out that the swings in pre-day voting were very different from the swings on the day, and also there were a lot of postals.  Not one of my better projection efforts this one, or anyone else's.

5. 2023 NSW Election Day Live

Coverage of the above mentioned election on the night as Labor returned to government in NSW under Chris Minns after three terms in opposition.

6. 2023 Voice Referendum Live

On the night coverage of the Voice referendum as the Yes vote lost as heavily as the polls said it would.  Also included some debunking of some false media turnout narratives.

7. Voice Referendum Polling: Rolling Final Week Roundup

The last of eight Voice referendum polling roundups I released, with an aggregate of 41.3% for Yes.  Included graphs with tracking of various forms of undecided vote and the Yes vote based on whether the poll used forced choice, a single pass-option with undecided allowed or a double-pass option with undecided allowed.   

8. Voice Referendum Polling: How Low Can Yes Go?

The sixth of the eight Voice roundups.  Included my ten-point assessment of why No was winning.

9. Voice Referendum Polling: Nothing Has Stopped This Trendline

The seventh of the eight Voice roundups. 

10. Fadden Live: Who Gets The Swing?

Live coverage for the Fadden by-election, in which the LNP recorded a slightly above-average swing for an Opposition vacancy but there wasn't really anything too much to see.  

Graph Of The Year

Not sure this will be a regular feature but an annual review for 2023 would not be the same without posting this one more time.  This is the graph I spent many hours through the third quarter of the year updating as Voice polling followed an accelerating downhill path to exactly where Yes ended up.   The decline of the Voice to a heavy defeat was not about who said what when or took what position: it was about pure electoral gravity.  As a mid-term vote at least, it turns out that it never had a chance.

Some other stats

The ten biggest days of the year for site visits (in terms of "session starts") were 26 Mar (NSW), 1 April (Aston), 14 Oct (Voice), 27, 25 and 28 Mar (NSW), 15 July (Fadden), 9 Oct (Voice), 2 April (Aston) and 29 Mar (NSW).

The most popular pieces started or written in any previous year were the incredibly outdated bio page, Poll-Shaped Object Fails To Prove Opposition To Proposed Hobart Stadium, The Federal Government's Majority Is Three Seats Not One, How Many Federal Electorates Have You Visited? and Jim Molan's Senate Result In Historic Context.

The ten most clicked tags were Tasmania, pseph, voice referendum, Hare-Clark, silly greens, Legislative Council, Victoria 2022, Greens, rant warning and silly lefties.

The top ten visiting countries were Australia, UK (+1) , USA (-1), NZ (+1), Canada (-1), Indonesia (re-entry), Netherlands (-1), Singapore (+1), Germany (+1) and France (-2). 136 "Google countries" visited in 2023 and 182 have visited in total.  This year saw apparent first-time visits from Barbados, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Faroe Islands, Guinea, Isle of Man and Kiribati but I suspect some of these had previously dropped off the board in the old Analytics.  The most populous countries never to appear remain North Korea, Niger and Chad.  

The top ten cities this year were Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart, Brisbane, Perth (+1), Adelaide (+1), Canberra (-2). Central Coast (+2), Newcastle (re-entry) and Wollongong (new).  For some reason Analytics counts "Melton" separately from Melbourne.  

The top hit sources were: Twitter, Google, Poll Bludger (+1), Wikipedia (re-entry), The Conversation (+4), Facebook (-3), Bing (-), Redit (-4), The Guardian (re-entry) and Tally Room (-2).  Ignoring search engines the next two were Instagram (meaning Threads) and MSN.  

Orders of the year

Definitely happening in 2024 will be the Northern Territory election in August and the ACT and Queensland elections in October.  The NT and Queensland Labor governments are federally dragged and will be eight and nearly ten years old respectively; history suggests both will be doing well to survive.  For the ACT Labor-Greens administration no such risk is forseen.  There will be the Dunkley by-election and also at least two Tasmanian Legislative Council seats.  Very left wing Hobart has a vacancy where the fortunes of former Greens Leader Cassy O'Connor will be of interest, while in Prosser a test for the government as Jane Howlett (Lib) presumably defends the seat she won narrowly over Labor in 2018.

In the maybe category, the next Tasmanian state election is scheduled for 2025 but could plausibly be in 2024, by accident or by design.  (Voters in the sidebar here expect it will.)  The next federal election is also scheduled for 2025, with redistribution and state election obstacles to going earlier, but a narrow window in late November perhaps if the government sees a desperately good reason to go sooner.  

Thanks all for the interest during 2023 and Happy New Year to all readers!  Thanks especially to those who have donated to help fund this site during the cost of living crisis.