I was about to do an update when I noticed one of the authors is logged in so rather than risk have them lose whatever it is they are writing I’m going to hold off and fill the time by giving some details of visitor numbers, most popular articles, search terms etc. The site has existed in some form for two years and our peak traffic so far was this October when we broke 10,000 unique visitors (10296 to be exact) and over 17,000 individual visits (the difference being due to some of the unique visitors coming here more than once in that period). Our most popular article rather unsurprizingly is the Anarchist FAQ index page which has now had around 25,000 views since its creation a little over a year ago.
I was about to do an update when I noticed one of the authors is logged in so rather than risk have them lose whatever it is they are writing I’m going to hold off and fill the time by giving some details of visitor numbers, most popular articles, search terms etc. The site has existed in some form for two years and our peak traffic so far was this October when we broke 10,000 unique visitors (10296 to be exact) and over 17,000 individual visits (the difference being due to some of the unique visitors coming here more than once in that period). Our most popular article rather unsurprizingly is the Anarchist FAQ index page which has now had around 25,000 views since its creation a little over a year ago.
The FAQ index consistently tops the ‘Most popular article today’ box which is near the bottom of the right hand column except on days when there is new content that has been advertised off site. As our writer base has grown and as individual writers are posting more frequently its normally to be found in posting 3 or 4 in that box. In general an article can expect to attract around 600 readers in its first month on the site although that can soar. Anarcho’s The Economics of Anarchy piece has attracted 11,459 readers since its publication this September, most of that traffic seemed to happen in a very short period probably concentrated on the 24th and 25th October. From the traffic records I think this all came down to a listing on Stumbleupon as in October it drove 8451 visits to the site, which is way above normal.
Apart from google and other search engines our external traffic seems to come from links posted to Facebook or from the other major anarchist sites like Anarkismo.net, AnarchistBlackCat.org, Infoshop.org and LibCom.net as well as a certain amount of traffic from Wikipedia artices and other blogs. The search engine traffic is topped by the terms you’d expect, anarchism, anarchist, revolution and writers.
Blog posts typically get traffic at a lower rate generally reaching 250 readers in the first month but individaul ones, particularly if they are topical can get a lot more traffic. Listowel – echo’s of the dark days of the 1980’s and the Kerry babies received over 600 visits in the first three days for instance. There is quite a bit of author variation down at least in part I suspect to the amount of promotion authors put in post publication. A simple posting of a link to Facebook will generally see 10-20% of your total friends follow the link. As of last month in order to up the retention rate of random visitors with created a twitter account for anarchist writers to which the title, part of the summary and a link to every new article is sent. This is growing slowly, its had 34 followers so far but it does seem to already be pulling in a measurable amount of traffic as twitter is climbing the list of external referrers this month.
Our visitors are come as you might expect from the Anglophone countries and roughly by order of population although Ireland as you might also expect given the number of writers from Ireland is higher in the listings then it should be. Of the non-Anglo countries China is a growing source of traffic, its around positions 12 in the October list, ahead of many European countries. In October the Philippines was ahead of Denmark and Mexico and Brazil beat New Zealand.