libcom's annual report 2007

200,000 visitors in one month? well done lads.

Not quite visitors - visits. So it's about 120,000 different visitors - some of them obviously come back multiple times each month - averages about 1.2 times per person (although some are probably 100 realistically). Even that isn't quite right because it's done by ip address - so if ten people use the same ip address, it's one visitor, if one person posts from 10 ip addresses - they count as ten visitors. But anyway it's gives you an idea.

Unfortunately, most of the sites on the internet don't publish this sort of information, at all, so it's hard to tell how it compares, but still fun to watch, and nice to see upward moving graphs.

Thanks Joe, that's interesting. Sounds like you have less visitors, but as you say higher average page views for each one.

fwiw I just checked October (which was a 'normal'-ish month) and we had almost exactly 1,000 unique visitors who looked at 100 or more pages during the month. I don't know of a way to do this with visits, but it gives an indication of regular use. This was out of of 110954 visitors in total. I'd guess that it's between 5-15,000 visitors per month who come back to the site more than once that month, or have a decent look around (more than ten pages or whatever) before they leave - unfortunately the chart stops at 90 pages in the software and I don't know of a way to find figures for the middle or end of the graph, but will try to find a filter at some point.

Yep. it's hard to tell what percentage of visitors since I know that regular users use google too (I must generate 20 google referrals a month myself trying to find stuff I've lost), but we do get a lot of google traffic - at a guess I'd say at least 80-90% of visitors (which'd match above guesses more or less).

Well afaik a the majority of visits to websites on the internet, taken as an aggregate, now come from google (as opposed to bookmarks, links etc.) - although I can't find the article where I read this. Similarly, to become a regular user, someone has to find the site initially - links and offline referrals are good, but tend to only reach people who are already involved in this area of politics (taken very widely, but still). Also, although clearly a very high percentage of people with no prior interest in the site's overall aims will not come back - either after clicking away as soon as they see it, or reading the one news/history article they were after an never coming back, we know that some do - since they still post here.

Well if you rely on SEO targeted at search engine quirks, then yes, but we don't. The only things we do which are particularly geared to search engines are human-readable urls (because they have keywords in them) and trying to keep the markup clean and readable - but imo these should be done anyway for most sites. We used to have a "meta-data" module which filled in the keywords and description tags, but it never worked properly, so we gave up. Fwiw, most of our referrals are for quite obscure searches: it's stuff like "soweto riots" "etaples mutiny", "communism in germany" "cwu strike" "winter of discontent" "asda distribution" - and out of 33,000 different keywords in October, less than a couple of dozen generated more than 100 referrals. If we were getting 50% of traffic from being the top google result for "anarchism" or "communism" then I'd agree entirely of course. (Actually the top result for both anarchism and communism is wikipedia, that'd be a different kind of worry, but sites like flag do show up in the top ten, and we're not in the first 5-6 pages for either.)

I think the 5-10,000 per month who come because of Jack's sex text interview do certainly. People coming from google looking for specific information will likely read (or not) the one article they got to then leave as well. I'd have to say I think this is a result of the way people browse the internet, rather than the site being particularly uninteresting . I do the same to the BBC, newspapers, youtube, most political sites as well - I rarely browse unless I've gone to the site with that in mind in the first place.

Nice to see you're paying such close attention considering your low opinion of us. We were going to do this more regularly (the graph was done at the beginning of December but we were a month late posting it, so made it a year-end report). I think this is useful information for people to know about, and we will do it again (probably in 3-4 months).

Yep I'd agree with that, especially the high response to drama (although that's also true for big strikes as well - we get a few thousand visitors due to rail/post strikes, and of course got many more than that during the CPE, but stupid anarchist stuff does more than normal strikes and less than the CPE, make of that what you will). Overall it seems like we retain people reasonably well - on average over 100 people signing up for an account each month is relatively healthy I think, and we've had almost as many forum posts this year as we did in total for every previous year combined (and in general, the quality of the forum discussions has improved, if you compare it to a year or three ago).