The effect of newsletter sites on wine blog readership

I do not have paid subscribers for this blog, but it is still of interest to me how many readers I get for each weekly post; and so I do keep an eye out. This number varies greatly from week to week, most presumably because of the topic being addressed in that particular week. My weekly post readership has varied from a couple of hundred to nearly 23,000, but it currently has an average of c. 1,650.

However, it seems to me that the number also varies depending on how the post is addressed by those web sites that collate a daily or weekly summary of wine-related articles. For example, a particular Wine Gourd post could be highlighted by some site in any given week, in which case it may get more readers.

One daily compilation site where it is possible to highlight web posts in variable ways is Wine Industry Insight (WII). This is currently compiled on weekdays by Kara Daly, but has previously been done by Becca Yeamans and also by Kevin Merritt.

WII has three different ways to highlight any given web article in its daily list. It can be the (single) main “Today’s Top Story”, or one of at least a dozen “More Top Stories”, or one of another dozen or so “The Rest of the News”. The number of articles varies for each daily summary, as shown for the past couple of years in this graph.

The number of items in the Top Stories (Series 1) and Rest of the News (Series 2)
sections of Wine Industry Insight, from October 2023 to August 2025.

Each weekly The Wine Gourd blog post usually makes an appearance in one of that week’s WII summaries. Furthermore, the posts have appeared in all three sections. It is therefore of interest to me to find out how variable my readership is, depending on which section the posts appear in.

To this end, I have kept a track over the past couple of years. The table below lists the average number of post readers for each of the four possible WII categories (including not appearing at all).

As you can see, my average readership does indeed go up, the more highly any given post is highlighted by WII. Getting into The Rest of the News (*) increases readership by 43% compared to not making an appearance at all (—); making it into More Top Stories (**) increases readership another 29%; and being Today’s Top Story (***) increases readership another 19%.

So, this summary site does seem to make a valuable contribution to my blog readership, by choosing how highly to emphasize any given post.