Every so often, we post an article about the LMP blog. Aside from the occasional appeal for money or volunteers (and cryptic posts about owls), they’re mostly a way of taking stock and letting you know about the things that go on behind the scenes.
People access the LMP Blog in two ways – the site itself and the weekly Mailchimp Newsletter, which lands in subscribers’ inboxes each Monday morning.
The Mailchimp newsletter has 723 subscribers and an incredible 33% of them have opened it. This may not sound that impressive, but honestly, that and a click-through rate of 9.5% are pretty decent, according to people who know about these things. We’re chuffed, anyway.
The LMP Blog gets about 22,000 different visitors a year, amounting to 48,000 screen views – and this is what they looked at.
Although we continue to post about 300 articles a year, you’ll notice that 2 of the top 3 posts are concerned with the voting rights of refugees. The popularity of the original post in 2017 was what prompted us to rewrite the page for the 2024 Elections. We reckon this has more to do with the lack of info on this subject than the stand-out quality of our content, but who knows?
It’s harder to say how many regular contributors we have because – aside from tally counting with a pen and paper – there’s no automated way of finding this number out. (Or if there is, we haven’t found one – and we don’t have time to tally count 300+ posts.) We do know there are at least 15 regular contributors, and we’re super grateful to them and everyone who uploads content themselves. Their posts amount to about 2/3rd of our content.
So, who pays the bills on this? We’ve written about this before, and thanks to the generosity of Leeds City Council’s Communities Team, our web-hosting, security and Mailchimp costs are covered for the next couple of years. Please note, none of this covers the actual costs of producing content – making and moderating posts or uploading and rejigging things for our contributors – but it’s a heck of a start, and we’re incredibly grateful to everyone who chips in. A couple of LASSN donors are big fans of the Blog, and their generous donations enable the “half hour a week” Jon tells them it takes to keep things going smoothly. Some weeks are busier than others ;o)
Security concerns have also shifted radically over the last 4 years. In 2020, the LMP blog experienced a lot of brute-force hacking attacks and relatively few sophisticated attempts.
In November 2024, the brute force attacks are far fewer. Still, the number of complex attacks have grown at an alarming rate – which is why the combined elements of funding for web security and the Sisyphean work by Ben at Totaal matter so much.
That’s about all there is to say for now – other than to thank you for reading this far and for your ongoing support of the LMP Blog. We love that this platform continues to grow and thrive because of the many people who contribute little and often. You are what makes this Blog what it is.
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