BY JOHN PERCY
Since 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly first started being posted on the world-wide web in September 1995, we knew it was an opportunity to reach a whole new layer of readers. When, after a while, we were able to put all the back issues on the web as well, starting from our first issue in 1991, we realised it was becoming an invaluable resource for research.
However, it's only in recent years that we've realised how widespread GLW's reach is and how extensive its web readership. Our web readership is also increasing rapidly.
During the build up to the US-led invasion of Iraq earlier this year we happened to come across a ranking in a computer magazine that listed GLW as the most visited Australia political web site. It was ahead of all other political web sites according to the Hitwise web surveying company.
A few months later, we belatedly saw another survey confirming this. Hitwise had announced that during the invasion of Iraq, Australians wanting political information first went to two overseas sites — the British Guardian daily's site, then to Michael Moore's site, and thirdly to 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly.
We then started doing our own checking fairly regularly, via the Alexa company (alexa.com, linked to Amazon) and also Trafficranking.com, comparing the popularity of GLW with other left and political sites in Australia and around the world.
According to Alexa, the GLW site is currently ranked 72,949 of all web sites in the world, and 78,829 according to Trafficranking. The next ranked Australian political site is Labor Net, ranked 83,812 by Alexa and 276,983 by Trafficranking, then the Australian Conservation Foundation (133,010 by Alexa), the ALP (245,782), and the Greens (338,208).
Some other Alexa figures: Chaser, 354,008; the US Socialist Worker weekly, 226,004; the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, including its weekly paper, 518,524; the Communist Party of Australia and its paper, the Guardian, 1,681,599; the Australian International Socialist Organisation and its paper Socialist Worker, 1,739,049.
Steadily rising
We've been able to get raw data on visitors, hits, page reads, and amount downloaded per day and month from our service provider, and these indicate that the GLW site is becoming increasingly popular.
The traffic to our site has been steadily rising. For example, last December we averaged 2958 visitors per day; this month we're averaging 8064. There is a similar trend with other indicators: hits, 17,557 per day in December, to 39,119 now; files downloaded, from 12,636 to 26,595; and pages 11,052 to 22,869.
On most of the indicators, our traffic will more than double during 2003. Our visits roughly doubled in 2001, and also in 2002.
We have plans to significantly increase the usability and usefulness of our web site over the coming months, and take long overdue steps to actively publicise the site, so we can look forward to an even larger growth in our readership.
It was to be expected that we'd have a big increase of visitors to our site during the invasion of Iraq — GLW carried a host of articles giving essential information and analysis not available in many other places. The numbers of visitors to our site surged in March, April and May. Some of these extra visitors came after quite a few key GLW articles were linked to from sites in the US that already had huge numbers of regular readers.
Some of the sites that have linked to GLW include Indymedia, What Really Happened, Information Clearing House, Common Dreams, and Antiwar.com.
Then there are all the regular links to the site — 1260 of them according to Alexa. GLW is on the Yahoo and Google directories, and many other lists and libraries' links of course.
Where readers are coming from
From our own statistics, we know that many of our visitors come via our supporting or related sites, such as the Democratic Socialist Party, Resistance, ASAP (Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific) web sites, and the GLW discussion list. But we also know there are a huge number of links from very unexpected sites — some right-wing sites, some totally apolitical sites, such as a site that seems to cater for gold and silver miners and speculators.
We also know that many of our visitors are directed to our site from search engines, especially Google.
Our site statistics provide some interesting insights into which issues most regularly direct people to our site, which articles from back issues of GLW are most read in different months. The obvious search strings of "91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly" and "91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳" are usually at the top of the list, indicating readers familiar with the paper, but lacking our web address.
One of the most popular search strings, bringing about 400 visitors a month to the site, is "Fidel Castro", not surprising given the excellent coverage given by GLW to the Cuban Revolution over the years. The string "Cuba" also brings another 100 per month, although how searchers manage to pick one of our 1960 links among the 13,300,000 links that Google returns for a simple "Cuba" search is hard to fathom. (We're not in the first 60 sites returned, most of which are Cuban sites, or Cuban solidarity sites, apart from the first — the CIA managed to get itself ensconced there! Does that reflect an obsession?)
A more unexpected very regular attraction to our site is "Karen Silkwood", the US anti-nuclear activist suspected of being murdered in 1974 for her union and anti-nuclear activity. We've only carried one article commemorating Karen Silkwood, in 2001, but it regularly brings about 350 visitors a month to the site, averaged over the last 10 months. Last September, for some reason, it hit a high of 958.
The Australian who attracts most visitors is Eddie Mabo, averaging about 150 a month. John Pilger also brings over 100 a month regularly (a couple of his GLW articles appear on Google's 3rd page of search results.)
Some search strings just attract visitors for a month or two while they're topical. "Rachel Corrie" attracted 200 in March, the Morris McMahon strike, 100 each in June and July.
"Iraq", in combination with specific questions, has attracted many visitors throughout the year, but in March and April "Iraq women" attracted nearly 500 visitors each month. In May, our coverage of Laci Peterson's murder in California brought 1800 visitors. (Keen Google searchers would have had to have wade through the first 200 out of 150,000 links.)
Regular readers
There is a large base of loyal weekly GLW readers on the web. There's invariably a peak on our graphs for Monday and Tuesday, after GLW gets uploaded to the site on Sunday night. Sometimes the Monday traffic is twice that of Sunday! Part of the weekend trough would be accounted for by readers who only have access at work (or prefer to spend their time more productively on the boss's computer). But there would also be regular readers who visit on other days of the week.
It's not possible for us to get an absolutely accurate picture of what proportion of our readers come from Australia and what proportion from overseas. But we can be certain that at least 24% of hits came from Australia in October (searching from domains with a .au extension). Many of the .com or .org or .net domains (63%) would be from the US, but some of them are spread around the world.
We can also get a general indication that there are many readers in the Asia-Pacific region through the large number of other left sites from the region that link directly to the GLW site, and these visitors show up in our statistics; for example, 500 visitors a month coming from the Indonesian Indomarxist site.
To get an idea of the full impact of the GLW web site this year, look at the totals: In the last 11 months the GLW site has had 2 million visitors, 10.5 million hits, 59 million Kbytes of information have been downloaded in 6.9 million files, and most importantly, 5.9 million pages, which roughly corresponds to 5.9 million GLW articles having been read.
But this isn't a cost-free endeavour. Without financial support from our readers it would be impossible to manage and maintain our web site. In the previous issue and this edition, we're asking our readers to ensure the continued production of both the hardcopy and electronic versions of GLW by becoming a Friend of 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly. Just fill out and send us the form on page 5 or visit
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, November 26, 2003.
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