Monthly Report for October 2012

In October, traffic here at Politics Plus was up in all major categories, except Page Views, which was way down.  This has me completely baffled, because with such a major decrease in Page Views, there would be no way to maintain the Hits and Bandwidth, let alone increase them.  About a year ago, there was an inexplicable increase in Page Views that lasted for almost a years.  I suspect that AW Stats changed how they count views back then and just changed it back.

Reported period	Month Oct 2012
First visit	01 Oct 2012 – 00:00
Last visit	31 Oct 2012 – 23:59
	Unique visitors	Number of visits	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
Viewed traffic *	16,551	39,818 (2.4 visits/visitor)	192,017 (4.82 Pages/Visit)	787,418 (19.77 Hits/Visit)	19.91 GB (524.29 KB/Visit)
Not viewed traffic *			314,063	382,463	9.44 GB

The first time someone comes to the site during a month, they are counted as a Unique Visitor and a Visit.  Subsequent visits 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.  19.91 GB is a little more than 19,910,000,000 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 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 October 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 down an average of 5 seconds.

umber of visits: 39,818 – Average: 258 s	Number of visits	Percent
0s-30s	32,947	82.7 %
30s-2mn	1,671	4.1 %
2mn-5mn	928	2.3 %
5mn-15mn	983	2.4 %
15mn-30mn	686	1.7 %
30mn-1h	1,543	3.8 %
1h+	1,060	2.6 %

That’s not bad at all, because we had more visitors.

Here are our top five articles for October.

A Reason to Support Elizabeth Warren          10/03/2012     1,791 views

Jane Smiley: Capitalist Pigs                            1/17/2010          938 views

Bainport Is Growing                                     10/13/2012          900 views

Open Thread–5/12/2012                                5/12/2012          867 views

Why Fox Is Banned in Canada                        3/07/2011          776 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 up.

20 different referring search engines	Pages	Percent	Hits	Percent
Google	9652	68.3 %	18,674	76.3 %
Stumbleupon (Social Bookmark)	2797	19.8 %	2,950	12 %
Microsoft Bing	923	6.5 %	1,389	5.6 %
Yahoo!	465	3.2 %	728	2.9 %
Google (Images)	103	0.7 %	337	1.3 %
Unknown search engines	60	0.4 %	71	0.2 %
AOL	33	0.2 %	38	0.1 %
Yandex	25	0.1 %	65	0.2 %
Microsoft MSN Search	18	0.1 %	18	0 %
Ask	14	0 %	14	0 %
Microsoft Windows Live	8	0 %	52	0.2 %
Dogpile	7	0 %	11	0 %
MyWebSearch	7	0 %	7	0 %
WebCrawler	2	0 %	2	0 %
InfoSpace	2	0 %	2	0 %
Searchalot	1	0 %	1	0 %
Earth Link	1	0 %	1	0 %
Digg (Social Bookmark)	1	0 %	1	0 %
Lycos	1	0 %	1	0 %
Go.com			111	0.4 %

Our top five non-blog referral sites are:

http://www.care2.com/               2,098

http://www.reddit.com/               1,071

http://jabberwonk.com/                  917

http://www.tumblr.com/                 426

https://www.facebook.com/             399

All are up, except Tumblr.

Our top 15 blog/news referral sites are:

http://crooksandliars.com/

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

http://www.roseanneworld.com/

http://www.rumormillnews.com/

http://www.synapticstew.com/

http://amelio.newsvine.com/

http://frieddogleg.blogspot.com/

http://oakcreekforum.blogspot.com/

http://theleftinme.blogspot.com/

http://parsleyspics.blogspot.com/

http://www.infidel753.blogspot.com/

http://www.independentaustralia.net/

http://progressiveerupts.blogspot.com/

http://republic-of-gilead.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.mockpaperscissors.com/

http://disaffectedanditfeelssogood.blogspot.com/

http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/

http://okjimmseggrollemporium.blogspot.com/

http://nutsandolts.com/

There was a five way tie for 15th.  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 September.  I remembered and copied them off in time.  That’s two 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 (185)

Patty (177)

SoINeedAName (62)

Phyllis (53)

Jerry Critter (51)

Rixar13 (49)

Edith Belcher (39)

Angelica (22)

Gypsy (12)

Steve (8)

Lisa Gunther (7)

Marva (7)

Lee Evans (6)

mamabear (6)

tasunka maza (5)

Yvonne White (5)

We have 672,146 links on other websites, an increase of over 100,000.

Our Technorati.rating is up to 137, 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.  In fact, would someone who knows the people who run Care2 ask if they have any intent to register with Technorati, and if not, encourage them to do so?

We have 3,805 articles and 36,731 comments, as of midnight November 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.  We are less 4 days from an election upon which America’s future depends.  We still have lots of work to do.

I hope that the additional explanation had made the numbers easier to understand.  Please let me know what I need to improve.

Overall, I’m very pleased with last month’s performance.  I would not be  at all surprised to see a significant decrease in traffic for the next few months, because so many are burned out from the election effort.