We're very open about our stats because we don't have anything to hide. In fact, openly publishing (curated) analytics about website visits is actually helpful to gauge the impact ProleWiki is having, where it's going, where it can improve and where it's expected to change, etc.
Current stats on the English-language instance, which is by far the most lively:
On daily visits:
- around 1000 daily visits
- this amounts to 30k visits per month!
- Unique visits represent 2/3rds of the above figure, which means very few repeated visits during the same month.
- >100k pageviews per month
- Comes out to around 3 pages viewed per visit (not necessarily homepage -> search -> final page)
On geographic provenance:
- Almost half (but below half) of all visits come from the USA, though virtually all countries of the world are represented over a yearly period. This makes sense as the English instance mostly interests English speakers, of which the USA is the most prominent country of origin on the Internet.
- The only countries that did not originate any visits this year so far is the DPRK, Turkmenistan, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea. 2 Asian countries and 8 African countries. Every other state/country/territory (we use a wider map than the 196 UN states) generated at least 1 visit this year. This is still only for the English-language instance.
On charting evolution:
Since we started tracking visits (anonymously and with non-proprietary, self-hosted software) some 695 days ago, we see an increase in daily visits by 1.09 per day. This seems low, but consider that:
- We still register almost 1000 visits per day, the 1.09 figure is the durable increase over time.
- It's a positive increase, meaning the website is becoming more popular regardless.
- This amounts to 30 extra daily visits by the end of the month. By the end of 2024, if this trend continues, we would see a durable increase of 121 daily visits, going from 1000 to 1100 daily.
- We finished 2023 on December 31st at 959 thousand pageviews.
- We expect to reach 1 million pageviews for the year in early October.
- At this same rate, we will end 2024 with 1.163 million pageviews.
- This is a 121% difference from 2023.
On the pages visited:
- Without surprise the most visited pages day after day are the index/homepage and the recent changes page.
- After that, the most visited content pages generally revolve around patsocs. Pizza index has been popular recently because of Iran's retaliation. Whatifalthist is also a big one because he keeps saying dumb shit on Twitter.
- This shouldn't be too surprising especially as these visits mostly come from Google searches. This means we rank generally well for these terms.
- Overall, over 850 wiki pages are seen each day. These can be any content type: library books, plain wiki pages, special pages, categories, etc.
- While many pages only register between 1 and 3 clicks per day (the vast majority of our pages in fact; over 80% of all visits go to those), these are still important: it's information that we were able to provide to readers that they otherwise wouldn't have read on ProleWiki!
- We see that specific pages also receive interest which correlate with wider news. Claudia De la Cruz's page for example was a contender for top-visited for a few days in a row when she announced her candidacy for presidency of the USA.
Hope you found this interesting.
Thank you so much for all the work all of you do on this!