Kasama: Passing 2.5 Million Page Views

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Category: Kasama

Created on Tuesday, 23 November 2010 12:06

Written by Mike Ely

Several have asked me to post this: This Kasama discussion site recently passed 2.5 million page views.

This means that Kasama posts have been accessed that many times since the site was created -- and it means we will pass 3 million page views sometime shortly after the end of our third year.

Brief Shoutout

• Many people have made this site possible -- and you all know who you are. Thousands of people have shown such great interest in our work, our discussion, and the larger common cause of liberating humanity. This milestone reflects (in a modest initial way) that larger interest in a common determination to unite for radical change.
• We urge  all this site's supporters to actively find the ways to help the site reach a whole new level: Especially by reposting and circulating our core discussions, and using social media (reddit, stumble, Facebook, twitter, and more) to help us reach new audiences. I personally see no reason that we can't increase our attendance and support (say) 10 times -- but it requires quite active and ongoing circulation of the site's best content.
• And we again urge our many devoted lurkers (1,000? More?) to think through ways to enter the discussions -- with questions, contributions, suggestions of articles, discussions of experiences and statements of opinions.
• Finally, there is a great deal of work to do in the core Kasama Project. If you have a high degree of unity with our goal of reconception and regroupment -- in the cause of rebuilding a revolutionary movement and a communist core -- then contact us for participation in the Project network itself. We are at this point a network of communists (both as individuals and early collectives) -- not a tightly wound cadre structure. We have collectivities that work on our podcasts, newsletters, moderation, theoretical work, study groups, outreach, local communist work, translations and more. If you have a high level of unity with this project - reach out to discuss joining in.

Understanding the Stats

A breakdown of what 2.5 million page views means:

As many people know, each "page view" does not mean (of course) that the post and its commentaries were read (each time it was viewed). The number of "page reads" is naturally more modest, and impossible to sharply quantify.

But here are some accompanying ways to put it in perspective:

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  We average about 3,000-4,000 page views a day (depending on the period you sample). It has been closer to 4,000 in the most recent period.

• A third of such page views are simply arriving at of our homepage (so don't actually constitute a "reading" of content beyond watching a video or reading the opening paragraphs. And at least a third are probably "quick on, quick off" of various kinds (people coming, for example, from google).
• I suspect a third of the views involve some engagement with the content -- rough guess, 1,000 page reads on a good day.
• Over almost three years we have had over 2,500 posts and over 22,000 comments.
• Our ratio of posts to comments has remained pretty steady at about 9 comments (on average) to each post -- which is  high for public discussions of this kind.
• When we adopted our new domainname "kasamaproject.org" in January 2010, we had a sharp expected drop in page views (about a third) as Google attendance stopped overnight.
• However aside from that major drop, the trendlines in attendance and viewing have generally held steady, with perhaps a bit of continuing climb over time. Over this year (for example) our monthly page views have gone from our low point of 64,000 in January to 105,000 in October.

Here is a glimpse of our most popular posts.

For those interested: The use of SEO techniques in the creation of our site and posts has been important in generating traffic far beyond the usual and expected circles.

Few people are using stumbleupon and reddit to promote Kasama yet (more people promote Kasama discussions on Facebook, with important results). Those using these social media are having a significant impact on drawing new viewers. (We urge more people to support the site by tapping into social networking -- especially stumble and reddit, which seem to have strong responses when tapped... suggestion: each promote one likely broad-interest post a day?)

About a third of our traffic is generated using such forms of promotion (Google SEO and social media combination).

As you can see, for example, some of our top articles draw attention almost exclusively because of Google image search (for example the Minotaur and Greenland articles), others benefit from a mixture of interest in their images and content (our article on Transformers, District 9, Che Guevara and Puerto Rican independence).

And some pages (like "About Kasama," Pamphlets, Polemics, History) are a measure of traffic generated simply by radical interest itself.

Home page		889,362
Understanding Che Guevara -- 42 Years After His Murder		68,645
Puerto Rico's Fight for Independence		67,361
Nepal Maoists: Mumbai attack signals intervention		43,281
9 Letters to Our Comrades		30,810
Self-Government and Imperialism for Greenland's Inuit		30,508
Is Minotaur Goring Really Torture?		22,763
About Kasama		19,354
Beneath Transformers 2's All-American Surface		17,023
Joshua Bernard's Battlefield Death: The Photo You Aren't Supposed to See		16,147
I’ll Fly Away, O Glory! -- Outlaws of the Underground Railroad		15,810
The Birmingham Church Bombing of 1963		13,297
Obama CIA Chief Excuses Bush-era Torture		12,637
Blacks and Jews: A Revolutionary View		12,152
Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr.?		11,255
History		8,859
District 9: Gagging on a Spoonful of Tar		8,667
Video: Love, Sex and the Lives of Women in Nepal		8,017
Spanish Civil War: A Bitter War Over the Future		7,499
The Slave Rebellion of General Nat Turner		6,852
Spanish Civil War: Beginnings and Colliding Forces		6,798
Power to the People: The Lost John Lennon Interview 1971		6,365
Our Favorite Communist Films		6,004
Polemics		5,687
The Red Scare: A Filmography		5,645
Pamphlets		5,611
Mao’s Cultural Revolution Pt 7: Struggling to Liberate Women		5,215
Blacks and Jews: A Revolutionary View		5,188
Critique of Comintern in Spanish Civil War: Intro		4,921
Nepal: The Coming April Crisis, and India's Role		4,708
On Telling Each Other "How to Fuck"		4,649
Arundhati Roy: Walking with the Comrades		4,378
Indian in America Today: Ignored and Oppressed		4,144
Discovery in East Africa: Footprints of Our Ancestors		4,086
Letter 1: A Time to Speak Out Clearly		4,078
Memories for IWD: Women of the Triangle Fire		3,981

Rough numbers for top downloaded printable pdf pamphlets:

Nine Letters Response (by RCP) 1,213 9 letters to Our Comrades (Print Version) 522 9 Letters to Our Comrades (low rez Print Version) 953 Arundhati Roy: Walking with the Comrades 889 Exchange of Letters between Nepali Maoists and the RCP,USA - 2 Lines, 5 Letters 569

For comparison:

Downloads of the 9 Letters to Our Comrades (combining our two pamphlet pdf formats): 1,475 Visitations to the HTML web version of the 9 letters to Our Comrades: 30,810

If anyone has further questions of detail and stats, please feel free.