Monthly Report for September 2012

In September, traffic here at Politics Plus was up in all major categories.  The reason was obvious.  After August’s health issues, I was here for more days.  Because of requests from several readers, I’ll be explaining the data in more detail to help make it easier to understand.

Reported period	Month Sep 2012
First visit	01 Sep 2012 – 00:00
Last visit	30 Sep 2012 – 23:59
	Unique visitors	Number of visits	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
Viewed traffic *	13,366	31,162 (2.33 visits/visitor)	353,488 (11.34 Pages/Visit)	785,344 (25.2 Hits/Visit)	15.66 GB (527.03 KB/Visit)
Not viewed traffic *			284,169	345,904	9.31 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.  15.66 GB is a little more than 15,660,000,000 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 this 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.

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.

Number of visits: 31,162 – Average: 263 s	Number of visits	Percent
0s-30s	25,505	81.8 %
30s-2mn	1,476	4.7 %
2mn-5mn	694	2.2 %
5mn-15mn	840	2.6 %
15mn-30mn	624	2 %
30mn-1h	1,178	3.7 %
1h+	845	2.7 %

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

Here are our top five articles for September.

Election Projection–9/16/2012                  9/16/2012        780 Views

Welcome to Autumn!                              9/22/2012         642 Views

When It Didn’t Trickle Down…                   9/16/2012         564 Views

Republican Supply-side Jesus on Display     7/24/2012         504 Views

The Marianas Plank                                 9/02/2012         482 Views

None or our articles became viral last month, sadly..

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, blogs, or news media (Care2, Reddit, etc.), and blogs or news sites.

Search engine referrals were up.

21 different referring search engines	Pages	Percent	Hits	Percent
Google	7559	70 %	16,004	79.2 %
Stumbleupon (Social Bookmark)	2353	21.8 %	2,523	12.4 %
Microsoft Bing	431	3.9 %	643	3.1 %
Yahoo!	253	2.3 %	407	2 %
Google (Images)	69	0.6 %	203	1 %
AOL	35	0.3 %	40	0.1 %
Unknown search engines	34	0.3 %	40	0.1 %
Yandex	16	0.1 %	37	0.1 %
Ask	13	0.1 %	13	0 %
Dogpile	7	0 %	11	0 %
Earth Link	5	0 %	5	0 %
MyWebSearch	5	0 %	5	0 %
Microsoft MSN Search	2	0 %	2	0 %
WebCrawler	2	0 %	2	0 %
Microsoft Windows Live	2	0 %	25	0.1 %
InfoSpace	1	0 %	1	0 %
Web.de	1	0 %	1	0 %
Avantfind			1	0 %
MetaCrawler (Metamoteur)			1	0 %
Excite			1	0 %
Go.com			224	1.1 %

Our top five non-blog referral sites are:

http://www.care2.com/            1,872

http://www.reddit.com/              764

http://www.jabberwonk.com/      737

http://www.tumblr.com/             486

https://www.facebook.com/        313

All five are up.

Our top 15 blog/news referral sites are:

http://infidel753.blogspot.ca/

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

http://synapticstew.com/

http://www.roseanneworld.com/

http://frieddogleg.blogspot.com/

http://www.sodahead.com/

http://theleftinme.blogspot.com/

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

http://oakcreekforum.blogspot.com/

http://progressiveerupts.blogspot.com/

http://bildungblog.blogspot.com/

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

http://amelio.newsvine.com/

http://www.thescienceforum.com/

http://reconstitution.us/rcnew/

http://parsleyspics.blogspot.com/

There was a two 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 actually remembered and copied them off in time.  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 (138)

Patty (125)

SoINeedAName (53)

Jerry Critter (50)

Edith Belcher (36)

Phyllis (31)

Rixar13 (31)

mamabear (18)

Angelica (17)

Lisa Gunther (16)

Gypsy (15)

Lee Evans (14)

John Dasef (6)

Marva (6)

Steve (6)

We have 552,775 links on other websites, a slight decrease.

Our Technorati.rating is up to 121, 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.

We have 3,718 articles and 35,481 comments, as of midnight October 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 than 40 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.