by Web Minister, July 1, 2002

Our June readership dropped off precipitously as in past summers. The party was already aware this was going to happen in early June, but those of us working in MIM infrastructure still hope to bust open some fireworks for July and August figures.

Summary statistics comparing June 2001 and June 2002*

Mostly we are unhappy with these figures, because we want to break 100% growth in number of computers served. We expect as we get toward the fall, the numbers for megabytes transferred will slow down their growth--unless of course MIM does something new to really ramp up as hoped in upcoming months.

In June 2001, at least 28% of our megabytes served went to Europe and another 12% went to Asia. In 2002, at least 25% went to Asia/Pacific and another 19% went to Europe. There is a strong likelihood that the majority of MIM traffic in June went outside U.$. borders, but we cannot know exactly how much more than 44% went outside U.$. borders.

The art and movies pages rivalled the home page itself for importance, and the MIM Notes page surpassed the home page for number of sessions that users had. There were also 1946 sessions with the Black Panther archive.

The most read English items included a MIM Theory article on murder in DC with 341 hits, 275 for our "Myths of Mao article," 342 pages read in MIM Notes 259, 262 pages read in MIM Notes 260 and 262 servings of the divest from I$rael .pdf by the California comrades.

Some other results were:
*357 Massachusetts text file sessions
*268 central RAIL sessions
*109 sessions with the new "Imperialism kills" page from RAIL
*114 sessions with the agitation page

An exception to the downward trend was Chinese, which fell somewhat in overall sessions but set records for individual article readings. We had 711 hits on our short Tiananmen article and 386 on a longer follow-up in Chinese. The Chinese articles surpassed all other articles on the web site for readership.

The table above does not refer to the number of times the given language page is "hit." The page will be hit some multiple of the times listed in the table above. The above figures point more to the number of "sessions" with that page.

Standard disclaimers:
1. The numbers in these reports are conservative estimates for a number of reasons.
a. The number of computer users refers to number of computers. The number of users could be higher or lower, because some computers serve pages to more than one individual, because individuals share computers and because conversely individuals use computers in more than one place.

b. The number of pages served should be thought of as a minimum, because statistics do not count re-readings or re-servings from local computer memory. Nor do they count sharing of pages once downloaded.

c. Most but not all graphics served are excluded from the figures to cut back on increasing "page" averages just by calling up various graphics.

2. Tracking where computers are from is bound to have some error as many wise users intentionally surf the web and leave a false trail. On the other hand, we doubt that such error means that non-U.$. readership is lower than reported, given that we do not count .com, .net and .edu readership.