Third Best Satire Site on the Web?

Apparently The Sleaze is one of the top five political satire sites on the web. According to a hubpage entitled 'The Best Political Satire Websites', that is. Whilst it would be nice to be given this accolade by some august body, respected throughout the world for its expertise in satire, rather than from a page set up by an amateur enthusiast on a commercial platform, I'm quite happy to take such a compliment from any source. The fact is that, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, running a web site can be a very lonely business - it is surprising how little feedback from readers you get. You simply have to assume that they like what they read from the fact that some of them keep coming back. Moreover, why should we give more weight to accolades handed out by some (usually self-appointed) expert body, than to those awarded by enthusiastic amateurs? Indeed, that's always been my problem with the awards often handed out on the web - their criteria are usually obscure and the authority of the awarding body unclear. At least with individuals and amateurs these things are clear - they're giving the accolade because they're readers who like the recipient's work. What better reasons or greater authority can you ask for.

For what it's worth, I'm not entirely sure that the compiler of this particular top five is actually a reader of any of the sites listed. Indeed, the list, (in which The Sleaze comes in at number three), looks suspiciously like the first five results you might get by putting the search term 'political satire websites' into a search engine. But like I said before, I'm willing to take accolades from anywhere these days. I only wish that The Sleaze was getting the sort of traffic you'd expect the third best political satire site in the world to be getting. Actually, I've pretty much given up trying to work out what's going on traffic-wise. It's all over the place - some days (like today), both visitor numbers and page views are consistently high, others they plummet. I can't discern any real rhyme or reason behind these fluctuations, (other, obviously, from the fact that posting a new story usually produces a twenty four hour spike in visitors, sometimes longer, depending on the story). Anyway, I'm thinking of quoting this accolade on the site's masthead - "Rated as Third Best Satire Site on the Web", or something similar. After all, every other site I see seems to have some quote or other, allegedly from a newspaper or magazine, saying how wonderful it is, at last I could have something similar that I hadn't completely made up!