Monthly Report for November 2012

In November, traffic here at Politics Plus was slightly down in all major categories, except hits, which was slightly up.  Page Views followed the same pattern from last month, confirming the change in the way AW Stats was allocating them.  I anticipated this drop in traffic because of post election burnout, as I said last month, so I’m quite pleased with where we are.

Reported period	Month Nov 2012
First visit	01 Nov 2012 – 00:00
Last visit	30 Nov 2012 – 23:56
	Unique visitors	Number of visits	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
Viewed traffic *	15,237	39,075 (2.56 visits/visitor)	193,656 (4.95 Pages/Visit)	589,587 (15.08 Hits/Visit)	12.05 GB (323.48 KB/Visit)
Not viewed traffic *			351,691	410,898	5.95 GB

The first time someone comes to the site during a month, they are counted as a Unique Visitor and a Visit.  Subsequent visits from that person are counted as visits only.  Every time someone visits or changes pages that counts as a Page View.  Any time a file on the server is accessed, that counts as a Hit.  Bandwidth is how much data is transferred from the site.  One byte is enough to store one letter of text.  12.05 GB is a little more than 12,050,000,000 bytes. 

Not viewed traffic is recorded when people read our blog without coming here, using RSS Readers, such as Feed Demon, and Aggregation sites, such as Google Reader and MyWeb.  Combining the two, we still landed eyeballs on over half a million pages last month.

Here are our 2011 stats.

And here are our 2012 stats so you can compare them.

Here is our most recent ClustrMap, last updated on December 1.  Note that our map reset on February 28.  The largest circles represent over 1,000 visits. The tiniest represent one to ten.  I feel thrilled that folks come here from all around the world.

Durations measure how much time people spend here on each visit.  The following chart breaks it down by ranges.  Our average durations were up an average of 36 seconds per visitor.

Number of visits: 39,075 – Average: 294 s	Number of visits	Percent
0s-30s	31,125	79.6 %
30s-2mn	2,067	5.2 %
2mn-5mn	968	2.4 %
5mn-15mn	1,215	3.1 %
15mn-30mn	828	2.1 %
30mn-1h	1,677	4.2 %
1h+	1,195	3 %

That means that the people who were here paid more attention.  It’s a great result!

Here are our top five articles for November.

Jane Smiley: Capitalist Pigs                         1/17/2010   1,251 Views

Why Fox Is Banned in Canada                     3/07/2011      794 Views

Romney Sued Over Milking Auto Bailout      11/02/2012     666 Views

Election Projection–11/4/2012                    11/04/2012     632 Views

Why Robert Murray Fired Workers               11/10/2012     591 Views

None or our articles became viral last month, sadly, but it is interesting to note that we are still getting traffic on items several years old.

Anytime someone comes here by clicking a link on another site, that is a referral.  We divide referrals between search engines, other major sites that are not search engines (Care2, Reddit, etc.), and blogs or news sites.

Search engine referrals were down.

18 different referring search engines	Pages	Percent	Hits	Percent
Google	8500	69.3 %	16,169	76.6 %
Stumbleupon (Social Bookmark)	2505	20.4 %	2,637	12.4 %
Microsoft Bing	498	4 %	882	4.1 %
Yahoo!	271	2.2 %	595	2.8 %
Microsoft MSN Search	225	1.8 %	225	1 %
Google (Images)	116	0.9 %	274	1.2 %
Yandex	41	0.3 %	106	0.5 %
AOL	40	0.3 %	43	0.2 %
Unknown search engines	37	0.3 %	65	0.3 %
Ask	8	0 %	8	0 %
Earth Link	4	0 %	4	0 %
Dogpile	4	0 %	7	0 %
Baidu	4	0 %	5	0 %
Microsoft Windows Live	3	0 %	17	0 %
MetaCrawler (Metamoteur)	1	0 %	1	0 %
WebCrawler	1	0 %	1	0 %
MyWebSearch	1	0 %	1	0 %
Go.com			65	0.3 %

Our top five non-blog referral sites are:

http://www.care2.com/       3,189

http://jabberwonk.com/      1,154

http://www.tumblr.com/        532

http://www.reddit.com/         375

http://current.com/               277

Reddit was way down, but Care2, Jabberwonk, Tumblr, and Current, which made the list for the first time, were up.

Our top 15 blog/news referral sites are:

http://www.synapticstew.com/

http://www.roseanneworld.com/

http://america-weeps.blogspot.com/

http://theleftinme.blogspot.com/

http://frieddogleg.blogspot.com/

http://infidel753.blogspot.com/

http://republic-of-gilead.blogspot.com/

http://reconstitution.us/rcnew/

http://www.buckdogpolitics.blogspot.ca/

http://progressiveerupts.blogspot.com/

http://www.sodahead.com/

http://bildungblog.blogspot.com/

http://www.politicalhotwire.com/

http://oakcreekforum.blogspot.com/

http://bohemiansouth.net/

Here’s some linkey-love in return  The best ways you can spread the message to others is to use the share button at the bottom of each article to list our articles on the the networking sites where you belong. Quote PP articles on your own blogs also helps.  The operative commandment here is “thou shalt steal.”  We’re on the same side here, and I encourage it.  Even if you want to repost a whole article, that’s OK.  Just link back, please.  Also, feel free to swipe my graphics in the articles.  If they are labeled with our Politics Plus URL, they are my work.

Here are the top fifteen commenters for November.  I remembered and copied them off in time.  That’s three months in a row!  I don’t count, as I’m the resident big mouth, and I try to reply to every comment, except replies directed at someone else.  Those who leave their URLs in their comments, also get linkey-love here.

Lynn Squance (189)

Patty (164)

SoINeedAName (53)

Phyllis (50)

Jerry Critter (43)

Rixar13 (30)

Edith Belcher (26)

Lee Evans (25)

Angelica (24)

GYPSY (23)

mamabear (18)

Pat A (16)

Pat Armstrong (14)

Yvonne White (13)

Lisa Gunther (11)

We have 915,272 links on other websites, an increase of over 250,000.

Our Technorati.rating is up to 140, a slight increase, but still low on the B list.  Despite over half a million links, Technorati only recognizes links on sites that have registered at Technorati.  Because we had so much traffic on Buzzflash.net, a registered site, we used to be an A list blog.  Buzzflash.net is gone and with the slowdown, we’re back to B list.  If only Care2 were to register with Technorati, we’d be in fat city, because any article that makes it to Care2’s front page should count.  One of Care2’s tech support people contacted me about something else, and I mentioned this to him.  He said he’s pass it on, but I’ve heard nothing more.

We have 3,894 articles and 38,025 comments, as of midnight December 1.

I recommend using your own avatar. Go to Gravatar.  Sign up using the email address you use to post comments here and upload the image you want to use.  Whenever you comment under that email address here or on any WordPress blog (several others too), that image will be your avatar.

Your participation remains a major part of what makes this blog worth reading, not to mention worth writing.  Thank you all for all you do, here and elsewhere, to support progressive solutions.  Together we are make are difference, and I hope I can keep my own participation up sufficiently to be worthy of you.

We are still  well under the traffic we had a year ago.  That’s only partially because I’m posting a little less than I did then to take better care of myself.  The big reason we’re down is still that many of the tools I used to publicize our articles are no longer available. That makes your help that much more important. 

I could not be more pleased with the role we played in the last election.  Of course we were not responsible for Obama’s victory or our gains in both the Santé and the House.  Nevertheless, we did out part, and along with thousands of other activists like us, we helped change the direction of this country.

Nevertheless, our nation still faces a severe infestation of InsaniTEA.  Republicans are still plotting how to place America in thrall to a permanent regime of Republican one party rule, in which elections no longer matter.  Our work has just begun.