[Update 22 May 2022 – My Media World Limited and Director Muhammad Butt sued over this article in the High Court in a counterclaim in case QB-2020-003936. They dropped the libel case by discontinuance, after MHN editor Samuel Collingwood Smith entered a robust defence. The effect of discontinuance is they are automatically liable for Smith’s whole costs.]
In an episode of the Raw Report not so long ago, Sonia Poulton called this blog, “little read”. In some ways is fair comment, in relative terms MHN has a low circulation. At times, however, articles have had vast numbers of views and I have been surprised by the influence I have exercised. Even so, MHN is not my day job – it is a pastime that allows me to do some good but these days I have little time for. In recent years I have posted far less than once a week. Unlike myself, Sonia Poulton claims to be a professional journalist – so it is only fair to scrutinise the performance of her viewer figures.
The Raw Report with Sonia Poulton was launched in September 2020. Since then, it has failed to take off, with views as measured from replays trending down to around 3,000 views per video. Picture used for the purposes of criticism and review.
Every Friday, Sonia Poulton livestreams the Raw Report. Shortly afterwards, a replay of the full episode is posted. The viewing figures for each episode are published. This can give a rough idea of viewership and trends. There are obvious caveats of course. Most views of livestream archives usually occur around the time of an episode but views can occur indefinitely so older videos will generally have an advantage. The number of views of an archive is not the same as the number of live viewers. There was a gap in the series when Sonia’s brother died.
Even so, after 8 episodes and 3 months, 5 days after the most recent episode it had 3,090 views. On 8 November 2020 episode 4 (uploaded on 6 November) had 3012 views. So it is not a huge change. Furthermore, not every view represents a person and not every view represents a person who watched the episode to the end. On 8 November Poulton had 8,473 subscribers and today she has 9,375. That is an increase of under 250 a week. It is not insignificant but it is not going viral.
