2014 has been a great year for Slugger, we have had all the major party leaders on the site in one shape or form. Along with this the Secretary of State and her Labour shadow have taken the opporunity to engage with us.
We have developed the Slugger Soapbox platform and have opened it up to any politician/figure wanting to promote a cause or highlight an issue.
The site is more nimble due to the excellent work that Brian O’Neill has put in to making us easier to use and much faster.
We have hosted more events, our Tweet Up in March, Election Hangover in May and Year End Review in December were all huge successes.
We also made the Ireland Power 100 (Only NI based site to do so) and New York Magazine listed us (along with the Detail) as the current affairs site to read before visiting Belfast.
All of this we have done to breath new life into the site and with the help of 14 new (excellent) writers we have managed to enjoy a record year.
Since February, Slugger has had more unique readers than the same time in 2013 in every month of this year. Nearly 90,000 people logged onto the site during the May alone.
In terms of page views the good people from Google Analytics tell us that 4, 581,316 clicks were made on Slugger this year which is a 7.4% increase on last year and up 18% from 2012.
The Future.
We are already getting plans firmed up the Westminster election and we are determined to give you events that you will not find anywhere else-stay tuned for further announcements.
We also hope to bring back the Slugger awards towards the end of 2015 and we will be announcing some new partnerships to bring you more of our content in a slighly different way.
Outside of all of this, we are always on the look out for new writers. We welcome all perspectives, but we are particularly interested in Unionist and Sinn Fein perspectives if any of you are so minded to join our ranks.
Before I finish, a big Thank You for coming in and reading our site. Wishing every single one of you a peaceful 2015.
David McCann holds a PhD in North-South relations from University of Ulster. You can follow him on twitter @dmcbfs
Discover more from Slugger O'Toole
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
