Happy Christmas to everybody?

A new report from Alexa, the Amazon off-shoot that monitors internet traffic world-wide, places Politicalbetting.com as the sixth most visited news and media politics site in the UK ahead of even the sites of those well established political journals the New Statesman and the Spectator.

YouGov is up there at number two because of all the traffic generated by its online polling. In the past week users filling in surveys have given it a page view rating of 30 as those surveyed have gone from one question to another.

That there are three blogs in the top six shows starkly how the political media is changing. Thus Guido is in fourth place with Tim Worstall site rated at number five.

This is the table as it appears on Alexa.

Alexa also publish a list of the most popular UK political blogs where PBC is in third position. Surprisingly ConservativeHome does not make the top 10 although Anthony Wells and his UK Polling Report site is in fourth place.

One factor that helps flatter PBC is that many visitors come back to the site time and again during an ordinary day. Alexa, unlike some other web usage trackers, does includes an element for page views in its calculations. Thus over the past week visitors have carried out more than 20 page views a day compared with 1.3 for Guido.

Coming up on PBC over the holiday will be results of the 2006 Prediction Competition and the US Mid Terms contest. There will also be our 2007 Prediction competition when we will discuss the main areas to be covered before setting out the questions themselves on New Year’s Eve.

A big thank you to everybody for their help during the year. Special mention to Philip Grant (Book Value) who has stood in as guest editor when I have been away, Paul Maggs who has managed our competitions, to Sean Fear for his regular weekly columns, to my son Robert for managing the technical side and my daughter-in-law, Lucille for the overall design. Thanks also to those who have written guest slots and to everybody for visiting the site and for taking part in our discussions.

On an average day PBC has a staggering 30,000 words of news, comment and opinion. I do hope you have found time to get some work done as well!!

Mike Smithson