Two Years of Blogging
My second year of blogging has been fully of highlights. I’ve moved to Substack,1 quadrupled my subscribers, had quite a few posts go big and seen the start of a small commenting community here that’s starting to include quite a few people who I don’t know personally - which I love2.
It still feels a tremendous privilege to know that if I write something that’s in my head, it will be read by hundreds of people, sometimes thousands. Thank you to all of you who read, like, lurk, comment and share - you make this blog what it is.
By the numbers
A year ago I had 126 subscribers and in the whole of 20233 I had just over 20,000 views. As of last night I have:
552 subscribers - thank you!4
4 paid subscribers - double thank you!5
13.9k views in the last 30 days6
Over 10% growth rate in the last 10 days7.
9 other substacks recommending me - huge appreciation to you, thank you!
And in the last year I’ve written:
53 posts - 11 more than the year before and (just!) exceeding my goal of at least one post a week.
Well over 100,000 words8 - roughly the length of a decent-sized novel9.
By the typology I set out last year10, it’s still a Tier 2 blog - but whereas then I’d just scraped over that boundary, now I’m punching at the upper edge of the category: half of my six posts in the last 30 days have had over 1000 readers.
But before we go further, the appeal: please take this post as an opportunity to recommend this site to others. I rely on word of mouth for my audience - and most of that comes when people personally recommend, forward or share a piece they liked.
More readers mean a better community, more comments and better dialogue between different readers with different perspectives. It means more people to do things like the Prediction Contest, the various surveys and more competition in the Christmas Quiz11. If everyone reading this persuaded someone they know to subscribe we could be on over 1000 subscribers by the end of the week!
The best way to recommend it is:
Email, WhatsApp or otherwise recommend it to someone - either the blog as a whole, this page or a favourite post.
Share a link to it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or whatever is your social media of choice12.
If you have a Substack yourself, and enjoy reading mine, add me as a Recommendation.
Looking back at the last year, the move to Substack has been undoubtedly the best decision I’ve made whilst blogging. The user interface is much smoother13 and the lack of customisability more than made up for by far fewer bugs. The network effect is also far better: 57 of my subscribers, or just over 10%, have come from other substacks recommending me14 - and my own recommendations have generated 197 subscriptions for others.
Substack also gives me a huge range of powerful and fascinating tools, almost all of which I don’t use.15 However, the most interesting is the one that tells me where my subscribers are based. Evidently I have readers across 24 countries and 16 US states:
As you’d expect, most of my readers come from the UK - but at only 84% that’s lower than I expect. I have 32 US subscribers16, 7 Canadians, 6 Ozzies and 5 Kiwis. Outside the Anglosphere pickings are a bit slimmer, but I have 4 in France, 2 in Germany and a smattering of others, including Kenya, Serbia and Pakistan - thank you all for reading!
To finish off, I’ll round up with some favourite posts of the last year - either for you to share, or just for those who’ve joined most recently to enjoy. I’ve gone for a mix of the big hitters, the quirkily popular and some personal favourites.
Big Hitters
A Tale of Spaddery - my personal account of the Department for Education through Brexit and COVID.
How Did England Fall Out of Love with Universities? The Four Horsemen of Fees, Culture, Expansion and Quality.
Five Elephants; or, Thoughts on Civil Service Impartiality17
Best of Politics
What will happen at the 2029 General Election? Five scenarios explored using a fragmentation model
Oh no! Oh no! We've elected a left-wing Labour Government (satire)
Personal Pieces
Memories of England: Hope and heartbreak across the years - written during and for Euro 2024.
Strong Ambitions, loosely held; or, Why I'm No Longer Seeking to be an MP
This Christmas Eve, and always, I stand with Israel - as true now as it was nine months ago.
Books and Films
Can This Cockpit Hold The Vasty Fields of Gondor? - A canter through book, film and musical.
History will call us wives: Love, Faith and Colonialism in 'Dune: Part Two'
Public Policy and Society
Inspiring Women, Invisible Women: Only certain 'types' of women are allowed into the new canon
Fair and/or Progressive: Fair and/or Progressive? A canter through inheritance tax, student loans and the 2012 Olympics to look at what's fair - and when fairness and progressiveness come into conflict.
Are Human Rights for Everyone? Why does the ‘Living Instrument’ ratchet only function in one direction?
Wildcard Pick for the Baker’s Dozen
Read, enjoy and share!
Best decision ever.
I also love it when people I do know personally comment!
Yes, I know the calendar year doesn’t line up with the ‘blogging year’.
This is a four-fold increase on this time last year, which itself is a four-fold increase from the year before. Less than 12 years until my readership exceeds the global population!
Paid subscribers get my heartfelt thanks and the opportunity to vote each quarter on what I’ll write about next.
I find this quite astonishing. Yes, September’s been a good month - but it means I had 70% of the views of the entire of 2023 (including Christmas Quiz and Prediction Contest) in the last 30 days.
If we take this as the long-term growth rate, I’ll have to wait a shocking 14 and a half years for my readership exceeds the global population.
I’ve not counted each individually - but a typical post is 1500 - 2000 words, and with at least a couple over 10,000, it’s going to be about that length.
And on that subject, you should buy my books, Imperial Visions and Visions in Exile.
Based on the number of people who read a typical post:
Tier 0 (1-9): You have a blog! Well done! It's read by your Mum, your brother and your best mate.
Tier 1: (10-99): Tribal bard. Your readership is in the tens, mainly people you know and see regularly, plus perhaps a few others.
Tier 2: (100-999): Small community. Your blog is read by hundreds of people, including many people you don't know. You've broken out of your 'personal contacts' space. In the grand scheme of things though, it's still pretty small.
Tier 3 (1000-9,999): Large community. Thousands of people read your blog every week. You're likely to be known and cited within a particular specialism, field or hobby, though probably not outside it.
Tier 4 (10,000 - 99,999): Global or national reach. Tens of thousands of people ready your blog; it will be shared many times each week. It's likely that some of those readers are influential, or speak of it to others. Yours is a name that other people may have heard of, in that if someone says, 'I was reading X's blog' to a stranger, they might know of it.
OK, the last is more or of an anti-reason.
Except, weirdly, the inability to support tables.
If you have a substack and regularly enjoy reading this one then please do consider adding it as a Recommendation - it makes a huge difference.
But are presumably very helpful for people who are making a living out of this.
Hi, aunts, uncles and cousins who are reading this! Though also 5 from California and a number from states where I definitely don’t know anyone, such as Kansas and Oklahoma, which is pretty cool.
Technically speaking I wrote this last year, but it went viral this year.
As a lurker with a minimal social media profile, I can only enjoy your posts but not do much in the way of amplifying…. But really glad your blog is doing well as enjoy it a lot 🙂
Congrats!
As a data point the other way, I really dislike Substack, and I'm here despite it, not because of it.
On mobile, the footnote popups are often displayed partially off the screen, so you can't read the information in them. (Example: https://imgur.com/a/3wpWJWd)
On both mobile and desktop, there's a really annoying workflow issue where you're partway through typing a comment but want to check or quote something in the OP, and the post is collapsed with a "Read more" link that looks like it's a dynamic link that will just expand the post in place without affecting anything else on the page (like your partially-written comment), but actually it reloads the whole page and loses the comment. I've been bitten by that a few times, and now know to use workarounds like opening the OP in a new tab, but I shouldn't have to in 2024.
Similarly, the "Continue Thread" button looks like it should expand the comment thread in place, but it actually opens a whole new page, and then you lose your place in the main thread (the back button might take you back somewhere else, especially if new comments have arrived in the meantime).
And it doesn't seem to be powerful enough to handle blogs in the tiers above yours. On ACX, it often just hangs while scrolling through comments and you can't scroll up or down.
It also counts comments weirdly. For example, this https://imgur.com/a/sdEDL1f looks as if there's one reply to Cathy's comment and then one other unrelated top-level comment. But in fact there are two comments total: Cathy's and your reply to it. (At the time of writing. Obviously, once I post this, there will be a second top-level comment.)
As for the stats, weren't you on WordPress before? They have a very similar feature, showing you where in the world your readers are based (although admittedly not subscribers): https://imgur.com/a/eD1SyW4
Clearly Substack is working for you and I'm not expecting to influence you away from it, but I wanted to offer the data point, and I'm also curious whether you don't encounter the problems with it or whether you consider them to be outweighed by the upsides. (I realise they're more reader-side than blogger-side issues - but you're a commenter on your own blog, and you presumably read and comment on other Substacks.)
I really like the idea of Substack, and the community and ecosystem of bloggers recommending each other, but I find it too buggy to consider moving my own blog there.