2025 Site Review

At the end of each year I post a review of the activities on this site in that year and 2025 was a big one.  For the first time since I started this site in 2012 there were Tasmanian and federal elections in the same year.  Not only that but they were back to back with one being caused before the dust from the other had fully settled.  

The following graph tells the story of the year in terms of user numbers per week.  This spiked at over 20,000 during the federal election and there was another big lift for the Tasmanian state election.  There were also smaller lifts from the Victorian by-elections that seem like about five years ago and the WA state election.  From about September on though there wasn't much going on.

Site activity as measured in total events was up 98% on 2024, which was itself probably the second-busiest year in the site's history, making 2025 easily the biggest year to date, overtaking 2022.  (Comparing 2022 and 2025 exactly is difficult because of Google's disgraceful handling of the transition from Universal Analytics to Analytics 4).  

2024 Site Review

Bring Back Universal Analytics Again!

As in my 2023 review, I again open this annual site review by expressing my disgust at Google stuffing with the continuity of my previous site stats by replacing Universal Analytics with GA4, which is not only apparently worse and different but also very hard for me to understand.   Anyway, again, on with the show as best I can ...

The dotted top line of the graph below shows activity in 2024 in the form of user numbers per week.  There is a big spike on the left caused by the Tasmanian election buildup and post-count, and a substantial spike on the right for the overlapping ACT and Queensland elections.  Other spikes correspond to the Tasmanian Legislative Council counts in May and the NT election in late August.  

Site engagement as measured in total events was up 84% on 2023, making 2024 as best I can determine the second-biggest year for the site after 2022.  That said, the new Analytics version seems to show high levels of site activity relative to activity on specific posts when compared to the old one, so I am not sure that is reliable.

In 2024 I released 79 articles, up 13 on 2023.  This included 27 articles about the snap Tasmanian election. There were also six articles about the Queensland election, five for the 2024 Tasmanian Legislative Council election and four federal poll roundups.  

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.

2022 Site Review

 This post presents site data for 2022.  The activity graph tells the story of the year (the units are unique pageviews per week). Click on the site review tab for previous years.

The four noticeable spikes here are the South Australian election, the federal election, the Tasmanian council elections and the Victorian state election.  2022 has seen the most traffic to this site in its history, beating the previous busiest year, 2018, by 35%.  The week after federal election night had nearly 80,000 unique pageviews, which was 2.41 times the previous highest!

2021 Site Review

This post presents site data for 2021.  The activity graph tells the story of the year (the units are unique pageviews per week):

Most of the activity in the year came between late February and early June, including the WA election, the Tasmanian state election and the Braddon recount.  The peak for the Tasmanian state election in early May was the fourth most visited week in site history (behind 2016 federal, 2018 Victoria and 2019 federal) and May overall was the fourth most visited month (behind the months of 2016 federal, 2019 federal and 2014 Tasmania/South Australia.)  

2020 Site Review

 This post presents site data for 2020.  The activity graph tells the story of the year (the units are unique pageviews per week):

Nothing much happened in the first half of the year except for a bad Newspoll for the government in mid-January.  However there were significant spikes of interest for the Eden-Monaro by-election, the Tasmanian Legislative Council elections, the NT election, the ACT election and the Queensland election.  The ACT election is the largest of the spikes above.

With it being neither a federal election year nor a Tasmanian state election year, traffic was well down on 2018 and 2019 (down 47% on 2019) and only exceeded the traffic for one other year so far, 2015 (this site started in 2012).  I also felt early in the year that COVID was swamping all other news consumption, leading to low interest levels in anything else.  

In 2020 I released 59 articles including this one.  This is the smallest number for a completed year so far (the previous lowest was 77) and a major cause of that has been the decline in both federal and state polling.  The most common subjects were federal polling (8 articles), the Queensland election (7), and the NT, ACT and Tasmanian Legislative Council elections (4 each).

2019 Site Review

This post presents site data for 2019.  The activity graph tells the story of the year (the units are unique pageviews per week):

Hmm, also looks a fair bit like my income pattern for the year.  There were three big events within two months early in the year - the NSW state election, the Tasmanian Legislative Council elections and the 2019 federal election, but the back half of the year has been extremely quiet, bar a small flutter of interest in September that was partly caused by an unusually exciting Tasmanian recount.  It is not just that the second half of the year was such a quiet one, but also the 2019 federal election aftermath was considerably less interesting than either 2013 or 2016, with only one remotely close Senate race and no House of Reps recounts (among other things).  As a result of all this, site traffic was down 22.5% on 2018 (which was the busiest year here to date) and also down 5.1% on the previous federal election year, 2016, making this year the third best for site traffic so far.  

2018 Site Review

This post presents site data for 2018, which was the most successful year on this site so far.  The rate of unique pageviews was 22.5% higher than in the busiest previous year (2016).  Here's the activity graph for the year (the units are unique pageviews per week):

The first part of the year actually started similarly to 2014, with roughly similar levels of interest in the Tasmanian and South Australian state elections.  However this year had the bonus features of the Super Saturday and Wentworth by-elections, and there was also more interest than in 2014 in my coverage of both the Tasmanian local government elections and the Victorian state election (the big spike on the right).  Partly this was because I wasn't working on anything else at the time Victoria rolled around and was therefore able to put much more effort into analysis of the Victorian upper house especially.  It's pleasing that people supported these efforts with donations - while I'm in no danger of getting rich from them, it does mean I can put major effort into covering an election and feel that the pay is something like real work!

2017 Site Review

Another year down in the just-over five-year history of this site.  2017 did not have either a federal election or a Tasmanian state election but there was still a fair amount of interest, especially in the Queensland election.  Indeed traffic by unique pageviews was only down 40% on last year despite the lack of a federal election, and up 25% on the last year without a federal or Tasmanian election (2015).  Moreover, there were more total pageviews than in the last state election year, 2014! Here's the activity graph for the year (the units are sessions per week):

The major event of the year on the site was the Queensland election, and quite aside from Queensland elections being always so interesting, I think the real reason for this is that the flow of information from official sources was very poor.  Other spikes included two rounds of Tasmanian legislative council elections and the Marriage Law Postal Survey, but there was also a continuing run of Section 44 fun that meant there was generally something to talk about in the second half of the year.

Fifth anniversary!

Today is the fifth anniversary of me, as one observer had it, "ragequitting" Tasmanian Times and starting this site.  This Blogger site was something I set up just to make sure I had a new home right away, but as it's turned out, as basic as Blogger is in some regards, I haven't seen a compelling reason to move.

Sometimes people ask me why this site just bears my name, rather than being called something snazzy like "The Poll Bludger" or "The Tally Room".  I have simply not come up with any alternative name that I am happy with.  At one stage I was tempted by "The Morning Mist", after a fantastic old quote from Sir Joh about polls that "come and go like a morning mist".  But it occurred to me that people would then start unkindly calling it The Morning Missed whenever I got something wrong, and besides the name would have at least one unsavory connotation in German.

2016 Site Review

Another year done for a site that is now just over four years old.  When I started this site I intended it just as an interim site while I explored other options, but in spite of some very minor frustrations (like difficulty in stopping spammers from even submitting comments) I've seen no compelling reason to move.

This year was a federal election year and the activity pattern for the year looks like this (the units are sessions per week):

The federal election and its post-count events basically swamp everything else.  Senate reform performance reviews maintained a high level of reader interest through to mid-August and after that the rest of the year was quieter, with little spikes for the ACT and NT elections. The massive federal election spike meant that this year had about 128% more traffic than last year, and about 60% more than the previous busiest year (2014).

2015 Site Review

That's another calendar year done for a site that's now a little over three years old.  Federal elections and Tasmanian state elections are this site's biggest events, so with neither of these in 2015 it's no surprise traffic here was down 43% on 2014 and down about 10% on 2013.  Still, with two state elections and the dumping of a sitting Prime Minister, the year was not exactly quiet.

The pattern for the year (the units are sessions per week) looks like this:

The two big spikes on the left are the Queensland and the New South Wales elections, and the Queensland one would have been bigger had my efforts not been limited by a major field trip.  On the right, interest fell sharply once the Canning by-election was out of the way.  The major difference between the Turnbull readings and even the quietest Abbott readings suggests to me that a lot of left-wing readers are more interested in reading about good polling for their side than bad.

2014 site review

That's just about the end of the second full year since this site started; so it's time for the annual stats review.  Obviously with a Tasmanian state election to cover this has been an even bigger year than last year, with about a 58% increase in site traffic.

In my 2013 annual review I noted that in late July 2013 I switched from Blogger Stats to Google Analytics to keep track of site activity.  Just as well, as early this year Blogger Stats started getting swamped by bot hits to the point that it would often rack up several hundred overseas hits a day even when there had been nothing new posted for a week.

This year I released 86 articles of which 19 concerned the Tasmanian state election and 17 were federal polling roundups.  As usual I finished almost everything I started - but I never got around to doing a final wrap for the Tas state election.  Also languishing incompletely in the Drafts vault thus far are:

* a full debunking of some ludicrous social-science rubbish re Tasmanian Devils unwisely published by The Conversation (I gave it plenty in the comments section; also see a rebuttal from scientists working on the species.)

* a critique of a Bob Brown Foundation skew-poll about the proposed revocation of part of the World Heritage Area (had this not come in the heat of the state campaign, or had the revocation had a snowflake's chance of success, I may have finished writing up that one.)

* a glossary of all the big words used on here.

In compiling the list of top ten articles for the year I had a decision to make.  Some articles get lots of hits from visitors refreshing for live coverage or revisiting for updates.  At the same time, an article that gets lots of repeat visits often does so because it is a long article with updates that could have been split into multiple posts if I felt like it.  When in doubt, aggregate, so ...
  

2013 site review

This site started in October 2012 after I left Tasmanian Times*.    This is my second "annual" list of the most popular articles of the year and other stats trivia, but obviously the first one to cover a full year ... and what a year in Australian elections and poll-watching it has been!  

For the first half of the year I was using the Stats function in Blogger to keep track of site activity.  However, the Stats function has a number of drawbacks.  Not only is it very prone to hits from automated, non-authentic traffic (including pulses of up to 300 hits at a time), but there is a thing called vampirestat that swamps your post visit stats as a claimed source of site visits.  Sites where articles are frequently edited (as mine are to add updates) seem to be unusually prone to getting their site stats clogged by vampirestat.  

Another drawback with the Blogger Stats function is that it actually misses (or loses) genuine hits.  In late July I started using Google Analytics.  I'd read before that because Google Analytics does a better job of not counting non-genuine traffic, it tends to return lower hit totals (to the dismay of some blog-owners' egos).  But in my case the totals returned by Analytics have been substantially higher, even if only counting unique user hits.

In future I expect to only use Google Analytics for tracking site stats.
  
The ten most popular articles this year (sorted by number of visits) have been:

2012 site review

This site has only been going since late October when I left Tasmanian Times.  I intend to continue it in its current form for some time though I may eventually change to another format, especially as the commenting and comment moderation options on this one are a bit limited.  Apart from that I am happy with how it is going. 

I've finished and published every article I've started, except for a detailed rant about the silliness of claims that Tasmanian Devils are on "the verge of extinction" and similar politicised nonsense about the species.  As the Tarkine mining controversies heats up and the species' plight is politically misused in those matters as it has been in so many others, very likely at some point I will become motivated/irritated enough to complete that one too. 

The ten most popular articles on this site in terms of site hits so far have been, in order:

1. The Abbott Factor: Opposition Leader Ratings and Party Standing

This article, published in October, showed that there is a relationship between the ratings of established Opposition Leaders and their party's two-party-preferred standing, such that the unpopularity of Tony Abbott could be costing the Coalition 1-2 points of voting intention.  It also showed that during the Abbott tenure, this relationship had until recently worked in the opposite direction to normal.