I’m pleased to say that Liberal Conspiracy had its best month ever, in terms of readers, during the normally dead month of July.

Obviously the News of the World scandal pushed up numbers, but other topics including Melanie Phillips were also popular (thanks Mel!)

The website had over 164,000 ‘Absolute Unique Visitors’ (Google Analytics) in July, although the real figure is likely to be over 200,000 as it does not include people who read the site only via RSS feeds.

Total page-views for the month were over 450,000.

Inevitably, this has put a lot of strain on the server and is costing a small bomb in hosting costs.

As I said earlier, the Guardian is now selling our ad space.

I have to increase ad space here with a banner at the top, since the Google ads aren’t as good.

Plus, our hosting costs are set to increase as the site keeps going down whenever we get a big spike in traffic. I’m also looking into moving hosting companies and will have to pay extra for flexibility to increase server memory when traffic shoots up.

These were the top ten stories in July, by page views:

1. Leaked audio: Rebekah Brooks angrily questioned by NotW staff
2. Watch: Jon Stewart on the Murdoch hearings
3. Charity workers dispute allegations against Johann Hari
4. Oslo Terrorist cited Melanie Phillips in his manifesto
5. An advertiser boycott of NotW – how you can help
6. Factcheck: Tory MP did lie about Piers Morgan
7. What are people like Melanie Phillips calling for then?
8. Daily Mail’s attempt to blame teachers for girl’s death backfires
9. Compare Melanie Phillips now to her writing after 7/7 attacks
10. George Michael wades in on NotW revelations on Twitter

Cheers for reading!

Reader comments

1. Liberal Conspiracy

   Changes at Libcon, after our best month ever http://bit.ly/o6ZqVf

2. Labour Uncut

   RT @libcon: Changes at Libcon, after our best month ever http://bit.ly/o6ZqVf < great work guys

3. sunny hundal

   Best month ever: @libcon records over 200,000 Abs Unique Visitors in July http://bit.ly/o6ZqVf

4. Ian Dunt

   RT @sunny_hundal: Best month ever: @libcon records over 200,000 Abs Unique Visitors in July http://bit.ly/o6ZqVf <Deserved.

5. Purbeck Pashmina

   Best month ever: @libcon records over 200,000 Abs Unique Visitors in July http://bit.ly/o6ZqVf

6. Aaron Porter

   Best month ever: @libcon records over 200,000 Abs Unique Visitors in July http://bit.ly/o6ZqVf

7. Kate Sinclair

   Best month ever: @libcon records over 200,000 Abs Unique Visitors in July http://bit.ly/o6ZqVf

8. mattwardman

   If you compare this http://t.co/M8W8aLR & http://t.co/teqrguk they're as near as makes no difference. Scrap ! I'll donate a comb.