Summary statistics comparing February 2002 and February 2003

I will start by updating what I said last month. Up to now, I have taken a very inexact approach to art, because there are people coming to look at some of the smallest pieces of our web page and leaving and there are other people making activist use of our graphics in heavy political discussions. Last month, MIM had over 11,000 users of its art page, most of which I did not count, in the previous report, because of an arbitrary formula I developed to exclude those most likely not to be "serious" readers of text.

In reality, artistic work is autonomous from word-oriented work. The proof is that it's impact is so hard to measure in the web statistics. We've often said that cultural work has to precede scientific work and this is our chance to put that notion into practice. From now on, we are going to separate art from text completely in the statistical reports. That will make our main report on number of users and pages even more conservative than it was while letting people decide for themselves what to make of our art page users.

This is a good time to start using an even more conservative approach than we were using before to estimate our readership. We are now excluding most robots, MIM developers and all art from the main figures. However, in February, we turned around our growth and started acceleration again, so even chopping out all the art users, we show growth compared with figures from last year's more liberal report.

Web traffic broken down by department: January vs. February 2003

This month, the Black Panther page had more hits than the home page and the index page of the arts page was a close third. The above table counts the languages all the same way, based on number of visitors. It reveals that Spanish is now language number two, French third and Chinese fourth for our web page.

In the aftermath of 911, we saw Amerikkkans take to reading some news. For the last several months, all indications are that when it comes to MIM, our readers are becoming more serious. Page numbers and megabytes are up. The above table also shows that the website's "encyclopedia"-style of content is attracting more and more attention while the timely articles in MIM Notes are not necessarily driving our website forward.

Just one more note on the above--the RAIL fliers showed a great pickup in traffic. The top three are amjalax.PDF, buckfushlal.PDF and empirela2.PDF wtih 154, 114 and 111 hits respectively in February.

Opening discussion of Five Year Plan for web traffic

Setting a goal

MIM does not have a five year plan for its circulation growth, but we will have a congress later this year, so I thought I would start discussing what is involved in order to obtain feedback prior to that congress. Then we can try to firm up our goals.

Right now we are getting 1000 different people a day, 30,000 a month taking 2.3 web pages each on average, excluding graphics. At it's height, the Black Panther Party had a newspaper circulation of 100,000. Probably, the Black Panther readers read more than three pages on average per month. Amongst bourgeois papers, "the Nation" is the respectable mainstream "left" at about 100,000 readers and only papers like the USA Today and Wall Street Journal can cross the 1 million mark in print.

At 500,000 we come into range of the elite like the New York Times in print. The really big news websites like CNN and nakednews.com still come in at the less than 10 million mark. I believe it is safe to say that at 500,000 we become huge by 1970s print journalism standards and something that cannot be ignored by 21st century standards.

The impact

For some of us, having MIM at the 500,000 circulation level would have obvious impact. Today when the mainstream papers want to venture into an exotic discussion of opinions, they likely mention "The Nation," which is a tired old social-democratic publication. We had a complete rarity recently when both the New York Times and the Washington Post mentioned the Workers World Party, because of the demonstrations against the war in Iraq.

Today when the government wants to spin or cover up something, the officials give "special" access to a handful of selected journalists who in turn dutifully put whatever angle on a question seems needed by Uncle $am at the moment. Yet, with MIM at 500,000 readers, the risks to the rulers start to enter a whole new realm, and the bourgeois media will be the first to feel the heat. The bourgeois media may choose to cover something a certain way, but the risk will be that MIM will make the public notice.

The details

At 100% annual growth, which MIM has experienced at some periods, MIM would obtain more than 500,000 readers in four years. For this reason, even under optimistic assumptions of steady work, we are making this plan a "Five Year Plan."

If growth is only 50% annually which is what we have seen at our low point these past two months, it will take us 7 years to reach our goal. Of course, that is using the past as a guideline and not assuming a huge political acceleration of events. Someone with real money could make all this happen much quicker. Otherwise, a timeline of 4 to 7 years seems realistic for our goal.

To achieve our goals, I would also like to break down how many users we might see by department each month.

Art--320,000 users
RAIL--50,000 users
Agitation--100,000 users
Notas Rojas--50,000 users
Bookstore--100,000 users
Countries page--100,000 users
Languages other than English and Spanish--100,000

We will also need some completely new ideas, such as discussion forums and famous bloggers. Hopefully we will improve our work with a number of areas ranging from discussion of the A.L.K.Q.N. to Confucianism and its role or non-role in economic development in Asia.

Thus far, the "big ideas" that are a success are having an art page, a RAIL page, a movies page, an agitation page, a Chinese page, a Spanish page, a bookstore, and a Black Panther archive. If you have any "big ideas" or ways of assisting an increase in MIM's readership, please contact us.