A detailed breakdown and analysis of our readership and content figures from the last year.
Here are our reader and user stats from 2013 1 . In short, the number of visits and unique visitors is up slightly on last year (although still below the peak of 2011). Although there has been a slight dip in the number of pages viewed, probably reflecting lower use of the forums, as users aren't reading as many multipage forum threads.
Traffic
Average monthly visits (annual change)
2009 - 130,585 2
2010 - 145,176 (+11%)
2011 - 207,856 (+43%)
2012 - 188,239 (-10%)
2013 - 197,845 (+5%)
Average monthly unique visitors
2009 - 88,731
2010 - 95,862 (+8%)
2011 - 131,108 (+37%)
2012 - 121,401 (-8%)
2013 - 129,762 (+7%)
Average monthly page views
2009 - 399,156
2010 - 425,007 (+6.5%)
2011 - 594,372 (+40%)
2012 - 461,677 (-23%)
2013 - 390,072 (-15%)
Traffic sources
The biggest referring sites (excluding search engines) last year were, in descending order, with annual change in brackets:
Facebook (+27%, including a 199% increase for mobile Facebook) - averaging nearly 28,000 visits per month.
Twitter (overtaking Reddit for the first time, +68%)
Reddit.com (+25%)
Wikipedia (-9%)
StumbleUpon.com (-22 %)
This continues the trend of social media websites, particularly Facebook, becoming increasingly important for our traffic as the more traditional websites like Wikipedia become less important.
Content
New articles per year
Articles posted 2013: 2312
Articles posted 2012: 2630
Articles posted 2011: 2167
Articles posted 2010: 1896
Articles posted 2009: 1558
Articles posted 2008: 1017
Articles posted 2007: 1225
Articles posted 2006: 1991
Articles posted 2005: 1867
Articles posted 2004: 75
Number of users who have posted articles per year:
2013: 187
2012: 202
2011: 199
2010: 180
2009: 133
2008: 158
2007: 73
2006: 70
2005: 67
2004: 14
Total number of users who have ever posted articles
end 2013: 662
end 2012: 586
end 2011: 481
end 2010: 380
Total articles:
2013: 16814
2012: 14511
2011: 11881
User comments posted per year:
Comments in 2013: 23687
Comments in 2012: 42199
Comments in 2011: 46361
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
Total comments:
end 2011: 433663
end 2012: 450780
end 2013: 499099
Total users who've ever posted one or more comments:
end 2013: 6554
end 2012: 5604
end 2011: 4533
end 2010: 3765
Social networking
Facebook likes
end 2010: ~10003
end 2011: 4373
end 2012: 10151
end 2013: 16950
Twitter followers
end 2010: ~8004
end 2011: 2050
end 2012: 5236
end 2013: 9951
Conclusion
This year we have seen general trends continue. Particularly the forums have had a huge decline in forum usage as more and more discussion takes place on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and tumblr.
The number of visits per month has been reasonably stable for the past three years now, oscillating between 188,000-207,000. This is despite server slowness problems which have worsened over that time period, causing the site to become quite unreliable towards the latter part of 2013.
Following a recent server upgrade, site reliability has increased significantly, and we hope to continue to make the site faster early in the new year. This will hopefully help more people view the site and have others feel more confident sharing our content on social media.
We continue to be extremely happy with the number of contributors who have been posting huge amounts of new content to the site over the last year - including our excellent team of bloggers.
So thanks again to all of these people, and all of you who have supported us or donated or shared our content.
We always need more help so please let us know if you are thinking about giving us a hand, either by e-mailing us or in the comments below.
If there is anything else people would like to know about the figures please ask in the comment section below.
Happy New Year everyone!
- 1 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.
- 2 This is the first year comparable statistics were available
- 3 Not an exact figure but an estimate. The last exact figure was 1500 in May 2010
- 4 Not an exact figure but a figure from memory
Comments
Well done guys, keep up the
Well done guys, keep up the good work.
~J.
Any thoughts on the up and
Any thoughts on the up and down feature playing a part in the downturn in comments?
Also, am I reading right that that more users are commenting, but those comments are fewer?
Lots of positives in there btw.
User comments per year seems
User comments per year seems like a serious drop.
iexist wrote: Anyway of
iexist
From what I remember from previous years, that is true to some extent. However, the main readership is based in the UK and within the UK, I think, particularly around London.
Quote: For the third year
Maybe I'm misreading this, but it appears the number of new articles dropped by 300 this past year?
I'd also be curious to see the breakdown of how many comments were posted under articles/blogs rather than forums threads, as I imagine the balance is progressively swinging towards the articles.
Chilli Sauce wrote: iexist
Chilli Sauce
Though I recall reading somewhere recently that according to Alexa, the largest group of libcom visitors come from Pakistan?!
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/libcom.org
According to this, Pakistan is just behind the US in terms of visitor percentage -
United States 17.8% 84,402
Pakistan 17.5% 5,774
South Africa 12.2% 3,802
India 9.1% 53,777
United Kingdom 8.4% 31,632
Canada 8.2% 16,740
Philippines 3.8% 10,481
Australia 2.4% 42,714
Spain 1.8% 88,294
Greece 1.8% 19,504
It's a bit confusing that you
It's a bit confusing that you vary the chronological order in your lists (between ascending and descending): user comments per year runs from 2013 to 2004 while your social networking list runs from 2010 to 2013, for example.
On the "city" thing, IP based geolocation is very inaccurate. I don't think any online tool ever gets my location right, it's usually the city where my ISP has their office. I don't think there is any direct link between where a person is based and where their ISP has their office, beyond "in the same country, probably". And that "office" is probably an address from the WHOIS database, it might actually be their registered office, i.e. some other company providing "registered office" facilities.
On one occasion I went into a
On one occasion I went into a random internet cafe and was happy to find libcom.org was one of the already saved bookmarks.
I liked the idea of tens of thousands of libcom.org readers from South Africa and Pakistan, India, Philippines...
Interesting stuff all
Interesting stuff all around.
I'm still confused about this, though:
Chilli Sauce
Chilli Sauce
Chilli Sauce
It's copy/paste from the 2012 stats :) Some editing required.
FWIW, I suspect that the down
FWIW, I suspect that the down turn in conversation is possibly two fold,
Libcom has become more of a place to post published stuff and has become a
wonderful repository of texts, etc. The other, that a vast majority of posters at this
point may already be in groups, circles, organizations, etc that pretty much are
defined and reflective in what is being archived, etc, at least on a theoretical level.
Perhaps there's a spike when someone posts a new publication or artilce,
but maybe folks have tired out of the same basic discussions, IDK for sure.
Libcom is still a good source for certain information and texts. I wish it was a
better trading post for information sharing. Perhaps Facebook has taken on some of
that.
Well, appreciate the Libcom folks for keeping the site going and being a reliable place to come
and view some really good things.
An off-topic discussion has
An off-topic discussion has been unpublished.
Jim Clarke wrote: AES
Tommy Ascaso
I'm curious to know, can you tell what the visitors actually read? This might be useful in helping to get a sense of what folks in those lands are interested/influenced/inspired/learn towards.
Chilli Sauce
Chilli Sauce
hey, yes that's right. The bit of text was an accidental copy and paste, removing it now!
syndicalist wrote: Jim
syndicalist
hmm Google analytics does collect a lot of data so it might be possible, however we don't really look at it in a much detail