How well are the Conservatives doing online?

If you’re a keen reader of political blogs you’ve probably noticed the latest bun fight over traffic levels to sites such Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes. One bright spot in amongst the postings and comments of, err…, varying quality on this topic is this one from Ministry for Truth, which casts its eye more widely over the Conservative online presence.

It’s not a successful picture that is painted:

There is, however, another side to the story of Conservatives 2.0 which bears consideration and that’s the failure of the Conservative ‘mainstream’ to make any significant inroads into the electronic frontier despite having thrown a considerable amount of time and money at various web-based projects.

You starter for ten here is that the Conservative Party’s official website generates roughly the same amount of traffic as Conservative Home, and a fair bit less traffic than either Guido or Iain.

Then there’s the sorry tale of ‘Platform 10’ which was supposedly going to become the Cameroonie answer to Conservative Home but which would perhaps have been better named ‘Died On Its Arse’ for all the interest it seems to generate. Although the site is regularly updated, it professes to be still in ‘beta mode’ – more for lack of interest from readers than anything else one suspects – and has its own Facebook group, the last wall post on which was made last November. Its ‘staff’ also seems to be more than a little inattentive.

And so it goes on in much more detail.