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A Brief History of the BTG (Part II) - Facts and FiguresDateline: 17th November, 2005It was in August 2001, at the Edinburgh Fringe, that I met Philip Fisher for the first time. It was at the George Square Theatre and we were waiting to see a performance of David Greig's Casanova by Suspect Culture and there was a (very long) delay. I'd seen Philip around and was aware that he was another critic but we'd never spoken. However that day we were both so fed up at the delay that we began moaning to each other! Philip had been reviewing for Accountancy World and other magazines and was looking for a more theatrical outlet for his work and I had been toying with the idea of finding someone in London who could review for us there. Reviews were a very small part of the About.com site (for such it was) in those days: we concentrated purely on news, with some comment on theatrical matters of the day. I did want to expand into reviews other than just of the Fringe, which we'd been covering since 1997, and knew that London reviews would be popular, but I wasn't sure if I would be able to use him because I knew what the About bureaucracy was like. Juts in case, we exchanged email addresses. It was about a month later that I was "let go" from About, so Philip was on board for the launch of the new British Theatre Guide. At the 2002 Fringe he introduced me to Catherine Lamm from New York who joined us then and so, by the end of the year, there were three of us. The following year we were joined by our now regular contributors Kevin Catchpole, Jackie Fletcher, Steve Orme, Jill Sharp, Gill Stoker and Pete Wood, and 2004 brought J.D. Atkinson, Rachel Lynn Brody, David Chadderton, Tony Layton, Phil Seager, Lennie Varvarides and Graham Williams. This year has seen Rivka Jacobson, Wayne Miller, Ged Quayle, Bronagh Taggart and John Thaxter join us as regulars. Joining us very soon will be John Cardale, who will be providing us with reviews and a monthly diary from Paris. Incidentally, our viewers are quite a cross-section of the theatre world: we have journalists, actors, directors, playwrights and theatregoers, and they range in age from early twenties to eighties! During the course of this year, too, Philip was elected to the Critics Circle, of which John was already a member. The growth in popularity of the BTG has been phenomenal. In our first full week we had 1,899 page views, which had increased to 5,000 by the beginning of January 2002 and to 8,000 by February. Now we have more than 18,000 unique visitors per week (and increasing) and weekly page views, regularly in the 70,000s, have topped 80,000 recently. Around 50% of page views each week are for just two sections of the site: News and Reviews. Although the proportions vary, there is rarely more than 1% difference between the two. We had our millionth page view in May 2003, the two millionth in February 2004. We reached three million in August 2004 and four million in June of this year. Our five millionth page view was last month. All of this was achieved by word of mouth or by people happening upon the site: we have never advertised. We can't afford to! As for content, this is growing all the time but a spot-check, taken just before midnight on 15th November showed there were 5,567 pages online (excluding indices), plus in the region of 3,200 images used across these pages. There were 2,482 news pages and 1,581 reviews, plus 758 reviews from the Edinburgh Fringe. By the time this page is online, however, these figures will be out of date (except for the Frnge reviews, of course, which will remain the same until next August!). << History
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