The Daily Mail’s Right Minds, also known as the “Heffington Post“, has been going for a month now. It is getting sharper. Nevertheless some old inky habits die hard, newspapers like to pretend they are the font of all knowledge and will rarely acknowledge other sources. Guido is used to being referred to by newspapers as a mysterious unnamed gossip website whenever we are leading on some scandal the papers are too timid to touch. Only this week the NewStatesman’s niche-website ran a disingenuous rebuttal to our scoop about Dan Hodges exiting their magazine without either linking to or naming this blog. We put that bizarreness down to bitterness, it must be soul destroying working for a discredited low circulation, loss making left-wing vanity publication.

In the case of our friendly commercial rivals at the Mail and the Telegraph we can only presume they don’t get it. In the last month for every reader referred to this blog by the Mail, Guido sent them 14 readers, for every reader sent by the Telegraph website, Guido sent them 12 readers. This asymmetry is counter-productive, Guido suspects they still have the print mindset, where a paper is held by the reader and holds onto the reader from cover to cover. Online the readers know the next story is really just a click away, anywhere and everywhere.

All the research suggests that linking-out doesn’t just give readers a better service, in increasing the utility to the reader websites get more traffic when they press the back-key to return, you don’t lose many. The Spectator is the biggest referrer to Guido followed by ConservativeHome, we in turn send them a fair chunk of traffic in return. Linking works in our mutual interests.