We are one year old today! Yes, that’s right — it’s been a full twelve months since TV Today launched as a blog. And to celebrate, I thought I’d unleash my inner geek (I keep it very well hidden — okay, not that well) and regale our lovely readers with some facts about what you lot have been reading in that time.
Top 5 most read articles
It won’t surprise anyone to know that our most popular page is the front page of the blog. However, each blog article has its own page, and over the last year, these are the five that have been accessed more times than any other:
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Way back when everybody was desperate to find out what happened in Lost, The Stage accidentally stumbled upon a clue that Desmond (played by Henry Ian Cusick), a guest character in Season 2, would have a greatly increased presence in the following season, when his wife Annie Wood gave up her job to move out to Hawaii.
Of course, since then Lost has moved to Sky One, and the series no longer has the grip on the UK it once did.
Go, go, go, Joseph — but Grease is the word
Apparently, the BBC and ITV decided that they would launch rival musical theatre recruitment shows. We’ll let you know how that progresses… :-)
Patrick Stewart: Star Trek was a ‘calamity’
Jean-Luc Picard himself talked to The Stage about how being hired by the hit TV show sidelined his theatrical career.
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Our piece about the Emmerdale online game revolving around Tom King’s murder came to become a place for the game’s players to hang out and swap clues.
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Was it because it was the week the guys stripped down to their loin cloths? Or was it because love-him-or-hate-him Seamus got the boot? Either way, this edition of our weekly ADWD recaps remains the most widely read to date (although last week’s is catching up fast…)
If you’re on the blog front page, continue reading for some more factoids about the last year…
Top 5 most clicked-on stories from RSS
Truth be told, a lot of the readership of the stories above comes from one-off sources: people looking for info. on a certain topic who are unlikely to read the rest of TV Today. In contrast, we have a small but faithful band of readers who subscribe to our RSS feed to get instant notifications of new blog postings. The stories they read tell a tale of a very different readership…
John Simm on life after Mars This may have had something to do with John Simm’s then rumoured (and now confirmed) guest casting in a certain TV series that is a TV Today favourite…
Your claim to fame is this! We do try to be Big Brother free, we really do. And yet, on the rare occasion that we mention something, the hordes descend…
A stroke of gene-ius The news that the opening sequence to Camberwick Green was to be recreated, Life on Mars style was clearly welcome.
Is there still Life on Mars? Yet another LoM-themed story. It’s good to see our readers were as keen on the show as we were…
What’s in a word? A discussion of swearing — and one swear word, in particular — on television. You’re a sophisticated lot, our readers, aren’t you!
Top 10 referring sites
We like all our readers. No, honestly. Even the ones who accuse us of having a vendetta against Rupert Grint (we don’t) or Nigel Harman (erm… no, it was just The Outsiders we hated). But who we love are the people kind enough to link to one of our stories, and get traffic flowing to our site from theirs. And so, in return, here are the top 10 referral sites (search engines like Google excluded).
Fark.com only ever linked to our Patrick Stewart story (see ‘Top 5 most read’ above), but they sent a huge number of predominantly US-based Trekkers our way…
Outpost Gallifrey, the world’s biggest Doctor Who fansite, has linked to us often from the news pages, as well its huge (and, occasionally, mad as a box of spanners) forums. We love ‘em.
Digital Spy, predominantly through its ever-active message boards, has given us quite a sizeable readership this year. Thanks, guys!
DanRadcliffe.com has thrown traffic our way whenever we mention young Mr. Daniel — and, on occasion, when we refer to a certain costar of his…
The Word is Not Enough, a one-man media blog from Rob Buckley, is one of the most consistent sources of traffic, certainly compared to the other sites in this list (who tended to provide peaks at certain points in the year). If you’re not reading his blog every day, then why the hell not?
Rupert-grint.co.uk now redirects to rupertgrint.net, but during the whole Grintgate affair lots of people were dropping by. We really do like him, honest. Well, we don’t dislike him…
Bad Science, the personal site of Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre, took special interest in our article about Channel 4 poo obsessive Gillian McKeith.
The Guardian TV blog has been giving us some lovely linkage ever since it launched (we especially love Anna Pickard’s blog round-ups). The largest peak of traffic came from the discussion of Channel 4’s greatest TV dramas clip show.
Television Without Pity, the American telly site with a biting wit, occasionally links to us from their message boards. The last time they did (on Sunday night, during the Baftas), we got so much traffic that the site collapsed under the strain!
Eye of Horus, another Doctor Who fansite, loved our piece on the BBC’s TARDISode experiment.
Top 5 most read tag pages
See those links at the bottom of every article? Those tags will take you to a page summarising blog posts relating to that topic. The most popular tag pages are:
Top 5 query search terms
A lot of our users come here after searching on Google or other sites. In the past 12 months, here’s what most of our search-based visitors have been looking for:
- Jonas Armstrong
- Lee Mead
- Lost season 3
- Any Dream Will Do
- John Simm
Top 5 articles with most comments
It’s always nice to know we’re not writing in a vacuum, so getting any comments at all on the blog is a bonus to us. Just occasionally, though, the commenters go mad! Number of comments is correct as at 12pm today, but some comment threads are still ongoing…
- The murder game (191 comments)
- Any Dream Will Do: Week 8 (80)
- ITV’s secret weapon (73)
- Lost Season 3: casting news? (45)
- Any Dream Will Do: Week 5 (37)
For those of you still awake, don’t worry — the geekiness ends here. All that remains is to thank our regular bloggers Mark Wright and (the much missed) Liz Thomas, as well as occasional contributors Alistair Smith, James Michael and our latest addition, Anna Waits. And most especially you lot, our readers — thanks for sticking with us!
Here’s to the next year!
Happy Birthday! It's a privlidge and a pleasure to be just a small part.
I promise to spell better than I did in that comment...
I can't believe it's a year though! I must be getting old.
Happy birthday!
Wow. Only rupert-grint.co.uk? Funny. I remember you guys coming over to ICM (http://www.rupert-grint.us) asking to extend the olive branch. You'd think that would mean that *we* were giving the best referrel. Or is because I kept telling people not to bother since The Stage was purposely trying annoy all Rupert fans? I mean, you even do it here. I'm surprised any Rupert fansite would even mention you, no matter what.
It's okay though, I'm good friends with the owner of rupert-grint.co.uk. I just thought it was *amusing*.
Hi Tao,
I can only go by what the stats package says! Referrers are ranked by total number of clicks from their site to ours over the course of the whole twelve months.
Tao give it up, Rupert is NOT as popular as Dan or Emma, deal with it for once, the kid doesn't have the talent and the looks, he is good in comedy I give you that but other than his funny faces there is nothing that will bring audiences to watch his solo movies.
Driving Lessons was a flop and as much as you promoted the movie in your site of (12 fans) it still was a flop, it didn't even collect what the movie was worth, not even 1 million dollars.
One more thing Tao, RG.NET is a very classy site compare to yours. And you can reply to my post all you want but don't expect a reply from me, so feel free to rant all you want.
Ah, it wouldn't feel like our birthday if we didn't have an argument brewing about Rupert Grint. Scott, we can blow the candle out on the cake now...
Happy birthday! Excellent blog, much enjoyed.
Happy birthday! Excellent blog, much enjoyed.
are you guys serious? you don't find rupert grint popular or pretty enough like dan or emma? and you have little groupies who are proud of you because of this? russell and mark are suppose to be males, right? wow, i sense a real cheerleader mentality emitting from you two. if this is your criteria, i think i can understand why you lot would not be very found of grint ( a little too masculine for your tastes, no doubt). really cutting-edge rag you got here.