by Web Minister, April 1, 2002

March was another breakthrough month for the MIM web page. Propelled by the art, Black Panther, movies, foreign languages, music, radio and especially MIM Notes pages, MIM's web page set convincing records for number of users. The web page again set a record for number of users since we started using the analytical means of counting that we use now. (It's possible that years ago web traffic was higher at some point, but we did not use the same means to measure it.)

Summary statistics comparing March 2001 and March 2002

March 2002 Percentage Change from Previous Year in Top 6 March, 2001 Departments

Web page department	March 2001 hits	March 2002 hits	% change
MIM Notes	4946	5990 (old system) + (69+161+145)=*	+28.7%
Home page	3442	4318	+25.5%
Black Panther page	3165	3734	+18.0%
Art	1052	3714	+253%
What's New?	1034	908	-12.2%
What is MIM?	704	785	+11.5%

*We have discontinued the old way of serving MIM Notes and statistics are now adjusted for that fact.

Since the above table focuses on what was popular a year ago, what it does not show is the changing composition of MIM web page readership. The movies page showed a more than four-fold growth from March a year ago and our Chinese page had it existed last year would have been in the top six chart above. In some aberration, our "Classic Quotes" page came close to tripling in traffic from a year ago. That fact and the fact that this past month, readers downloaded 134 .zip files and set a record for total MIM data transferred points to our most serious readers recorded yet.

The most popular Afghanistan-related story in December 2001 for the fifth month in a row was our story mourning the September 11th victims translated into Chinese with 67 hits. The Afghanistan page had 1296 hits despite my not updating it much.

At this time I'd also like to remind readers that as in past months these statistics include my own reading of the web page. Hence, I'd discount home page readings by 300 hits for the hits just by people developing it.

No particular news story jumped out to grab readers and back issue readership was very strong. Two of the top three English language stories read in MIM Notes were also movie reviews.

Spotlight MIM Notes

There were 500 hits on the "Myths of Mao" article and 565 hits on the most popular Black Panther article. A Tiananmen article in Chinese had 591 hits and 507 hits in English. Overall these are great numbers for MIM compared with the past, but they also mean that for the first time, the single most read article was in Chinese. Up to now, the articles in Chinese only led in the Afghanistan-related news department. Now Chinese language articles are leading in readers in theory and history as well.

Story name	# of hits
Zapatistas	146
Black Panther May 31, 1969	100
Panama y los Yanquis	76
Black Panthers Nov 16 1968	68
/nr/imni.html	59

In conclusion, we have to keep doing what we are doing and more of it, because it seems to us right now that we have come to understand MIM web page readers a little better. They are interested in culture--art, music and movies, not just the obvious history of China or the Black Panthers.