Match referee to carry out a pitch inspection at 9am tomorrow morning.Club remain confident playing surface will be passed fit and have plans in place for snow plough to work all day saturday to clear and make safe the walkways, entrances and steps etc.Main stand is the only part of the stadium that will be in use.Volunteers to help clear the snow etc from 9am onwards to meet at the club shop.

You can watch the pitch inspection on Facebook Live tomorrow morning from 8.30am.

Exciting.

Is that cause your doing the commentary Mick?

I'm confused why anyone would want to do that if I'm honest.

The games are great but pitch inspections?

Over 5,000 people watched the pitch inspection. It helps to get the message out send judging by the comments, the vast majority of that 5,000 thought it was a great idea.

5,000 people watched the pitch inspection when only 1,500 even turned up for the last game?!?! REALLY?!?!?

Wow.

Yeah, check the video on Facebook. I'm a bit shocked that there was such interest in watching a referee stick his car keys into the turf.

The York City Knights vs Bradford Bulls game attracted over 110,000 total viewers.

The delayed West Wales Raiders game attracted 35,000.

Power of social media at work.

Exactly what I was thinking about the pitch inspection. Slightly crazy but at least it justifies the effort.

The only way those figures can work is if those aren't unique visitors though, surely? I can't think 35,000 unique viewers watched a delayed one sided Bulls game.

Sounds like one hell of an opportunity for attracting sponsors....

I joined the video over 10 times the way Facebook counts that is 10 separate viewers. You watch for one second it counts as a view which makes the Facebook stats utterly irrelevant.

Sorry, but you're wrong on this.

After each broadcast you get the analytics and metrics which breakdown the unique logins from the total views.

I think you'll be suprised at the figures we have generated so far.

Do you have the unique visitor figures to hand? Whilst the ones you posted are impressive numbers, there's no way they are unique visitors. I'd be interested to see how many different people are watching rather than just total views.

I appreciate you can't account for more than one person watching on the same laptop, but there's no way on god's green earth that 5,000 unique devices were watching a pitch inspection for a League 1 game, so that figure must be something other than unique visitors. I would argue the same for the others too.

I should be clear. I'm not trying to knock what you're doing at all. I think it's an excellent initiative to be quite honest. But I also would like to see accurate figures and I've never believed anything other than unique visitors is relevant.

Surely, being hosted through facebook, people need to be logged in to view. Meaning that it should be very easy to quote unique users, even accounting for the same user switching devices part way through.

I would recommend that Mick ensures he is 100% clear about the definitions of the metrics, but if it is definitely unique logged on users then it would be hard to argue with the numbers, regardless of how unlikely they appear.

What's worse; tuning in to watch a pitch inspection for a league 1 game, or watching the pitch inspection more than once?

Mick, who provides the analytics and what method/key do they use to stop duplicates inflating the figures? Do they count on IP addresses? If so what do they do to mitigate those with dynamic IP addresses.

We had a team at work once who claimed a figure based on page imprints using google analytics but it was grossly inflated as that counted any movement on a page so would be useful to get an idea of how other do it?

When I watch online streaming of things like this, I will often count as more than 1 visitor. Largely because at some point the stream will buffer, which means you end up a few seconds behind the "live" stream. Each time that happens, you're further behind. So when there seems to be what could be a significant break in play (the "pop for a wee" moment when at the game), I'll often reload the page so I can catch up again without missing much. I'd then count as watching it again. Similarly if the stream is experiencing problems, you'll find most people are frantically reloading to try and get it working, thereby pumping up the figures.

If anyone genuinely went back and watched replays of a pitch inspection, I'd suggest they get help!

I watched for 80mins to make up for the postponed match.

I account for 93% of all the hits.

Did'nt you have a break for half time.?

To be fair, a pitch inspection at Odsal is far more entertaining than the games over the last few years.

There’s lies, dam lies, then there’s statistics followed by Gledhill claptrap Oh by the way the RFL have chosen Manchester now who was it that was spouting they had done a deal to be based at Odsal, here’s a clue Starts with G and last letter is L Answers on a post card to boost my ego c/o M Gledhill

It is very conceivable that the stream reached that many people. If someone who is friends with someone scrolls up their facebook feed and the video automatically starts playing. My ex uses facebook for her business and does live videos. Her first live video reached 17,000 people. She showed me the figures from what it said. So to say its damn lies is absolutely absurd. Mick has worked hard to try work his way back when he didnt cover himself in too much glory, he was obviously being fed something and rolled with it. He was doing his best to keep fans informed about what he was hearing. Rightly or wrongly his heart was in the right place. He seems to have worked extremely hard getting this up and running with the club for the benefit of the fans for free. So whos the one talking claptrap?