Tory Ministers blew thousands of pounds redesigning their Whitehall blog - and then saw readership plummet to just 35 people a day.
A vanity project to redesign the blog on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's website cost taxpayers nearly £6,000 last year.
The number of readers halved following the upgrade.
"What an utter waste of taxpayers' money," said shadow culture secretary Chris Bryant.
"Ministers could have got a blog for free, but instead paid thousands of pounds for this shambles which attracted thousands of fewer people to the site."
DCMS Ministers have slashed spending on arts, sports and music across Britain as part of the Tory-led austerity drive.
The Arts Council has already lost a third of its budget since 2010, with more brutal cuts expected this autumn.
But a written answer by Culture Minister Ed Vaizey revealed he still found £5,550 from his dwindling budget to lavish on the department's little-read online blog.
The blog includes self-congratulatory posts from Mr Vaizey himself, alongside other Ministers and civil servants waxing lyrical on everything from the BBC to Britain's oldest battleships.
Following the redesign, the blog's annual readership halved from 26,152 people in 2013, to 13,063 in 2014 – an average of just 35 per day.
"It's complete incompetence from Tory Ministers who are just throwing taxpayer's money away on these meaningless projects," Mr Bryant said.
Labour pointed out most popular online blog services such as WordPress are available to use for free.
Ed Vaizey
But Mr Vaizey insisted taxpayers were getting good value for money.
"The Department spent £5,550 on redesigning and rebuilding its blog platform in 2014," he said.
"The blog is consistently meeting its objective to introduce a higher percentage of new audiences to our policies, the sectors we support and the voice of the people who champion them."
A DCMS spokeswoman said the spending was a one-off cost for an "essential" upgrade of the blog.
"The DCMS blog was run on a platform that was so outdated it couldn't be viewed properly on mobile phones," she said.
"The new blog platform is simply an essential IT upgrade which does not incur any additional maintenance costs."
Source:
Tories spend fortune on blog nobody wants to read
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