JUST BACKDATED REACHES 300,000

In the past 24 hours Just Backdated had its 300,00^th hit, another milestone for my one-man micro music magazine.

In keeping with my custom of putting down a few facts and figures that are available only to the bloggers themselves whenever these landmarks are reached, here are some more statistics. The Top Ten blogs (out of a total of 548) are still all posts about The Who, the leader still that one about Keith Moon being in the last ever photograph taken (by Pete ‘Dougal’ Butler) of John and Paul Beatle, which has a virtually unassailable tally of 13,840 hits now, well ahead of number two, my scoop about The Who Hits 50 tour, on 5,168, with third place still occupied by my post about the launch of Dear Boy, Tony Fletcher’s wonderful biography of Moonie, which now has 4,152 hits. None of these have changed very much, though oddly the Moonie/Beatle chart topper seems to have had five fewer hits than it did when I celebrated my 250,000^th hit back in August. How can that be? I probably got my figures mixed up.

With a total of 548 posts, and the figure creeping up to around 300 hits a day, that’s actually an average of just less than 548 hits per post, which is a bit of a weird coincidence. This figure, of course, is skewed by all my Who posts getting well over 1,000 hits, many of them over 2,000, and they all seem to creep up gradually and, like my tribute to John Entwistle, one of the earliest posts (now on 2,280), getting a boost when an anniversary comes around. Similarly, there’s a gradual exponential rise overall as more fans around the world discover JB, with the result that it has taken far less time to go from 250,000 to 300,000 than it did to go from 200,000 to 250,000 – let alone from zero to 50,000.

Non-Who posts that have topped 1,000 are almost always the result of having been shared on a fans’ Facebook pages or websites, and this also explains why the Who posts have as many hits as they do. It gives me enormous pleasure to report that they include my recent tribute to Slade’s much-loved tour manager Swinn (Graham Swinnerton), which as of this morning had reached 1,432 – extremely heart-warming considering the subject isn’t a rock performer per se. This is far more than any other Slade-related post, a result that really makes the effort worthwhile. In descending order, the only other non-Who posts that have topped the 1,000 mark are the one about Rory Gallagher and his battered old Strat (2,848), Wilko Johnson’s appearance at Louder Than Words last year (2,210), my interview with Little Feat’s Lowell George (1,517), the review of Abba’s Live At Wembley album (1,659), the photos of The Beatles from the Looking Through You book (1,254), the extract from Tony Fletcher’s memoir Boy About Town, which is actually Who-related as it deals with Keith’s death (1,157) and, finally, just edging into four figures fairly recently, my report on Jimmy Page’s live interview in Knightsbridge from October 2014 (1,031).

The sources of all these hits remains pretty much the same with the US (135,224) well ahead on the UK (70,154), and Canada third on (10,325). Thereafter it’s Germany, France, Japan and Australia, followed by Russia and the Ukraine, both of which crept into the top ten fairly recently. In tenth place it’s the Netherlands.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone for visiting Just Backdated. I’ll keep on posting just as long as you folk keep on hitting.