I noticed that something quite surprising happened last night. I had cause to celebrate 2024 as being the best in this blog's history. Views this year hit 5 million, when last year, as a whole, they got to 4,985,000, and that was the previous best year, ever:
Of course, what's really surprising is that this has happened three quarters of the way through the year, with average traffic now running at around 600,000 views a month.
What is more, YouTube is now very slightly outpacing the blog in terms of views. The combined total is now exceeding 1.2 million a month, with other platforms adding more to the total.
Of course, many views are from people coming every day. There does, however appear to be little obvious overlap between the blog and YouTube: people here read the transcripts. There they view the video. I'm not complaining either way.
And I can confirm monetisation has not put people off. A first payment has been received. At £431 for part of August it was not to be sneezed at, although the channel is not breaking even by some way as yet. But, who knows? It might.
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I’m one of your more recent subscribers and hugely appreciate the detailed insight you provide.
One question which has been bugging me is that Darren Jones (Chief Sec Treasury) recently claimed in an interview that government debt was costing £115bn a year in interest – but surely this is the interest on savings and the government could just choose to stop providing that (if they wanted to)? Or have I misunderstood?
In haste the split is in tabloe 2 here https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/bulletins/publicsectorfinances/august2024
The figure is way down from what he claimed and almost none of the blue part of that graph – debt due on restating the redemption of index linked bonds – will be paid for many years
He was misrepresenting already out of date data in that case
The big increase was around 2022. Why did it rise then, do you think?
I had left City, University of London, and full time academia and could give more attention to the blog.
Thanks
we are grateful for your work.
Seconded.
Take this as a testament of your hard work, and immense value you provide to all of us Richard! First time commenting here, a note of thanks for your fantastic work, and dedication. As a university student curious upon the creation of money after hearing about continual budget deficits, and government debt burden’s, your work has been instrumental to guiding my political, and economic belief’s. While answering my curiosities’ that led me here.
Cheers
Thank you
Appreciated
I’ve been reading your blog for about two years. I quite often read some quotes from your blog out to my wife, so she should have been aware of my source. However, a couple of weeks ago she suddenly said ‘Have you seen this guy, this is amazing, I didn’t know this!’ (I can’t even remember what it was about now) – but she had discovered your videos and played bits back to me. What I’m trying to say is, your videos have clearly reached a completely new audience – at least in my house. Keep up spreading the word wherever spreading is facilitated – its working.
That’s amusing – and good news. Thanks for relating that.