We forgot our birthday, again. Arseblog News has turned 8

Blogs: “We forgot our birthday, again.”

News Hound: “I had it in the diary for 1st July…”

Blogs: “It was 1st June…”

News Hound: “Oh…”

Blogs: “As is the tradition, I’ll leave the post to you…”

News Hound: “Heh, just noticed we were six weeks late with this last year, we’re getting better…”

__

Yep, Arseblog News is officially 8-years-old (and 17 days).

I think we can all agree that this is terrifying. Where on earth did the time go? One minute we’re lamenting the 8-2 defeat at Old Trafford, the next we’re getting hammered in a European final on the edges of Asia. The joys of being a Gooner.

Of the Arsenal squad we started covering in 2011, only Laurent Koscielny and Carl ‘the Corporal’ Jenkinson remain … and we’ll be surprised if either is about to celebrate our next anniversary.

In the last two years, the rate of change at our club from top to bottom has accelerated so quickly that’s it’s almost been hard to keep up. Thankfully, that’s where we come in.

Without further ado, here’s our annual ‘State of the Arse’ address…

12,450 published posts on Arseblog News (that’s 4.2 juicy pieces of content a day, every day for eight whole years)
95,520 followers of the @arseblognews Twitter account
6,273 posts by @arseblog
4,637 posts by @AAllenSport
521 posts by Academy aficionado @JeorgeBird
245 posts by Arsenal Women expert @Stillberto
42 posts by stats guru @oh_that_crab
9 posts by former Gunner Graham Dougan – unsurprisingly, he STILL doesn’t have Twitter.

As always, a big thank you to the other contributors (hat tips to Hatta & Sam) who’ve chipped in along the way with match reports, analysis, translations and other features.

Their efforts combined with columnists Lewis and Arsenal Gent on the main site, Tom making sure the servers work and don’t explode, the player rating functionality, the apps and all the guests on the Arsecast with Blogs and Arsecast Extra with @Gunnerblog and you start to get an idea of how much of a collective effort it is to provide fresh, half-decent ‘content’ on a regular basis.

Our work hasn’t gone unnoticed and that fills us with pride. In December, we beat off some stiff competition (innuendo intended) to be voted ‘Best Fran Merida Fan Media’ at the Football Supporters’ Federation awards. That was pretty cool.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank all our members on Patreon. We’ve been going strong on there for about 16 months. If you like what we do here at Arseblog and you want to support it as well as getting extra stuff, you can sign up to become a member today for just €5 per month. You get instant access to all the extra content, which includes:

• Episodes of My Arse – chatting with famous Arsenal fans like Dara O Briain, Mark Strong, Bernard Butler, Ian Stone and loads more.
• History specials
• The Pastcast Extra
• Player podcasts
• Exclusive long-read articles
• Access to live YouTube streams, Q&As etc
• A free audio book version of Together: the story of Arsenal’s unbeaten season
• Others stuff too

To sign up, visit patreon.com/arseblog. Your support there is helping us keep everything else free as it always has been, as well as making improvements and changes to what we can offer you – including expanding our coverage, redeveloping our apps (coming this summer) and more.

Finally, we’d just like to say thanks to all of you for reading, listening, commenting, sharing our stories, sometimes coming at us with pitchforks. You lot are Champions League, even if the first team isn’t right now.

Cheers from all the Arseblog team and the Arseblog German Shepherds!