Statistics on libcom.org's readership figures between January 2009 and December 2010.
As mentioned a while ago, we said we would get together some more detailed statistical analysis of traffic to libcom.org.
As we now have two years of complete data using the same stats system (Google analytics) we thought now would be a good time to do that.
The annual figures show modest but significant improvements on last year. However, results over the last quarter of 2010 point to potentially very large increases in our readership. Time will tell if these are fleeting or lasting.
A quick note on traffic statistics first, though, is that different stats systems measure traffic in very different ways. So two different systems can give wildly different results. Our system excludes all bots, and only counts real visits by people.
Traffic
Annual figures
Average monthly visits
2009 - 130,585
2010 - 145,176 (+11%)
Average monthly page views
2009 - 399,156
2010 - 425,007 (+6.5%)
Average monthly unique visitors
2009 - 88,731
2010 - 95,862 (+8%)
Last quarter
Average monthly visits
Q 4 2009 - 139,333
Q 4 2010 - 174,163 (+25%)
Average monthly page views
Q 4 2009 - 415,672
Q 4 2010 - 467,763 (+12.5%)
Average monthly unique visitors
Q 4 2009 - 95,509
Q 4 2010 - 121,174 (+27%)
Most of our referrals continue to be from search engines (53%1 ), with 27% being referred through external sites, and 20% direct traffic.
The biggest referring sites (excluding search engines) last year were, in order:
Wikipedia
Facebook
StumbleUpon.com
Reddit.com
Twitter
With a 356% increase in the number of referrals from twitter in the past year.
Content
2010 has seen the largest number of new articles posted ever on libcom. 2
Total articles: over 9672 3
New articles per year
Articles posted 2010: over 1896 4
Articles posted 2009: 1558
Articles posted 2008: 1017
Articles posted 2007: 1225
Articles posted 2006: 1991 (note, CPE + Endpage + copying over articles from news + history that weren't imported into Drupal)
Articles posted 2005: 1867 (same as 2006, also we might have added the old news around then)
Articles posted 2004: 75
Users
We have a total of 23,595 registered users, excluding banned users. However, this does not mean much as many of them may be spammers. Here is the data we have on active users (excluding lurkers, whom we cannot count).
2010 has seen the highest number of users contributing articles themselves since libcom.org began.
Total users who've ever posted one or more comments:
3765
Total number of users who've posted articles (i.e. something other than a forum topic or comment):
380
Number of users who have posted articles per year:
2010: 180
2009: 133
2008: 158
2007: 73
2006: 70
2005: 67
2004: 14
Total comments:
387363
User comments posted per year:
Comments in 2010: 48802
Comments in 2009: 45728
Comments in 2008: 59144
Comments in 2007: 98942
Comments in 2006: 80823
Comments in 2005: 42210
Comments in 2004: 11267
We hope that our readers find some of this information useful.
Thanks again everyone who has contributed content, or contributed to discussions, or who has posted up links to libcom elsewhere on the net over the past year.
We will soon be doing some more analysis of our traffic compared to other radical websites. Watch this space…
If there is anything else people would like to know about the figures please ask in the comment section below.
- 1 we will be back to using 2010 annual figures for the rest of this piece
- 2 The absolute number of articles shown below may appear higher in 2006 but many of those were not new articles, they were articles imported when we merged our two content management systems into one.
- 3 Was counted prior to December 31. N.b. this does not include forum topics, of which there are 18,955
- 4 was counted prior to December 31
Comments
Interesting reading, thanks
Interesting reading, thanks for posting it up.
Would have been nice to have the monthly stats as well just for nosiness' sake.
No worries. Monthly totals
No worries. Monthly totals are kind of annoying to get. Those ones above based on dividing the annual figure by 12, or quarterly figure by three.
I will post it up if I get time though
the data in general confirms the pattern which I thought was happening: that amount of articles, news, history and all that has been going up significantly, and forum posting has gone down as we have prioritised the more serious areas of the site and tried to improve the culture of the forums (of course, part of the culture of the forums improving was also due to different antagonistic groups of people leaving, first primitivists, then later class war types and national liberation supporting anarchists which also reduced forum posting)
Just had a look at the
Just had a look at the traffic, because things seem quite a bit busier to me recently. Figures over the last month have basically doubled since the end of 2009. If I come across any more useful statistics I will do a more detailed post
Average monthly visits
Q 4 2009 - 139,333
Q 4 2010 - 174,163 (+25%)
last month - 292,221 (+110%)
Average monthly page views
Q 4 2009 - 415,672
Q 4 2010 - 467,763 (+12.5%)
last month - 848,583 (+104%)
Average monthly unique visitors
Q 4 2009 - 95,509
Q 4 2010 - 121,174 (+27%)
last month - 181,091 (+89.5%)
Steven. wrote: Average
Steven.
That's basically like the Independent's (daily) readership.
I'm assuming coverage (blogs,
I'm assuming coverage (blogs, articles, threads) of the UK anti-cuts stuff, North Africa & Middle East, Greece and Wisconsin probably has a lot to do with this?
Yeah, our traffic generally
Yeah, our traffic generally goes up when stuff is happening, and goes down when it's not, as you might expect really. So thanks to everyone for their contributions, especially on ongoing struggles!