PinkNews.co.uk is four years old

PinkNews logo surrounded by illustrated images including a rainbow, unicorn, PN sign and pride flag.

PinkNews.co.uk celebrates its fourth birthday today.

PinkNews.co.uk was born minutes before the 38th anniversary of the Royal Assent of the Sexual Offences Act – the legislation that partially decriminalised male homosexuality in England and Wales. Since 2005 we’ve broken new grounds in gay media.

We got on the political map with an interview with the then-Conservative Party Chairman Francis Maude, where he expressed his regret at voting for Section 28 (which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools) and claimed that the policies of his party were “immoral” and indirectly contributed to the death of his brother, and many others, from AIDS.

PinkNews.co.uk “outed” The Sun and The News of the World for photoshopping a privately-taken photograph of Ashley Cole to illustrate a story about an allegedly bisexual Premier League footballer.

We worked with The Times to expose the voting record of Ruth Kelly.

Tony Blair appointed her Minister for Equality despite the fact that she had never voted for gay rights. Our expose of her parlous record was a piece of investigative journalism that made every national newspaper and resulted in questions in the House of Commons.

Since then, we’ve been in the address book of every right-thinking MP, peer and government minister. We’ve become “the” publication that politicians speak to when addressing the LGBT community. Every candidate to be Deputy Leader of the Labour party spoke exclusively to PinkNews.co.uk during the campaign.

We hosted a debate between London mayoral candidates Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick.

Gordon Brown, found time to answer questions sent in by our readers upon his appointment as Prime Minister.

More recently, we’ve revealed accusations of homophobia within BBC programmings, resulting in a condemnation by former Culture Secretary Lord Smith.

But it’s not just politics that excites us. Just last week, we exposed a website seeking to out gay men cruising, last week leading to its removal from the net.

We’re as strong as ever and preparing for new and exciting ways to provide news and other services to our thousands of readers.

In the last month, we’ve had 295,410 unique visits from 192,479 unique “absolute” individuals. Some people read just one article, but some people read many more than that.

29,362 people visit the site more than 100 times a month, 16,064 people visit the site more than 200 times a month, while 4,536 people visited the site more than a staggering 200 times in the last seven days alone.

It will be these addicts that we hope to better service in the next few months, so watch this space!