by Web Minister, October 1, 2001

September was a very unusual month for MIM's web page. It appears that the public did its heaviest reading on Saturdays and Sundays, contrary to the usual pattern of 10 am weekday reading. However, also contrary to what we might think, the World Trade Center bombings did not dominate the web site statistics so much as to surpass that of pornographic fiction found on the same server. I have to report that this is a disappointment for me, and that I cannot account for the reasons for that, but I will present the statistics we have and let readers judge for themselves what is going on.

The readership of MIM Notes excluding the World Trade Center story was down from already abysmal August levels. Most other categories of web traffic were up, just not as much as we would have hoped. For example, the 10th most popular department of the web page had 3 times more hits than the 10th most popular department in August. Another example would be a misplaced article on Attica that had double the August traffic.

Because of some disappointment, I ran the statistics on September of 2000 to compare with 2001. What I did was to take the departments getting at least 500 hits in 2000 to compare with now.

September 2001 Percentage Change from Previous Year

Web page department	Sept 2000 hits	Sept 2001 hits	% change
Home page	1879	4243	126%
Western Mass RAIL	1713	172	-90%
MIM Notes	743	2875	287%
Black Panther Collection	582	1477	154%
What's New	575	1139	98%

Bookstore traffic to Amazon as measured by items examined by potential buyers at the MIM bookstore

September 2000 vs. 2001 and % change

37

118

+219%

The increase in traffic at our Amazon bookstore has to do with reader interest in material pertaining to the Black people, with over 40% of hits being on Black nation material. There is also increased traffic because of our expansion into movie sales. Note that the figures are lower than the number of people reading the reviews in the bookstore, because the figures are only for people who actually go to Amazon from our bookstore, presumably to consider making a purchase.

Of course, we did have an unusual situation with the World Trade Center news taking most of the attention. The article of September 11th mourning the deaths of civilians had over 500 hits and and the flyer we created in .pdf also had good traffic. Aside from the two specially promoted .html documents and one .pdf flyer, the most popular story on the World Trade Center coverage page was "Pseudo-feminists beat war tambourines" with 109 hits.

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 100 hits for the hits just by people developing it and I'd also discount the World Trade Center story hits at 3 hits per story, because those hits are just those of the developers, and not the public. On the bright side, the top MIM Notes article for reader interest was back in issue #200 and had to do with the KKK. It goes to show that work on MIM essays pays off years and years down the road.

Spotlight MIM Notes

Web page department	Number of visits
Home page	4243
MIM Notes	2875
World Trade Center collection text files only (no .html)	1990
Black Panther collection	1477
What's New	1139
Art	843
What is MIM?	717
Movies	681
Classic quotes and controversies	659
World trade center mourning article (not counted above)	572
Misplaced Attica article	492
World Trade Center .pdf flyer	371
Notas Rojas	293
FAQ	280
Links	266
Chinese (sorry nothing there yet)	246
World Trade Center: Violence reaches home for Amerikans	232
RAIL	230
MIM Theory	225
Contact MIM	197

We also had 142 hits on the French page and 108 hits on the Russian.

RAIL statistics

Top five movie reviews

Movie review	# times requested
Angola	29
Matrix	28
Moulin Rouge	21
Patch Adam	20
Reds	16

Of note, is that all the top five movie reviews by movie requests went to "long" reviews except for "Reds."

Top five theory articles by number of times requested

Theory article	# times requested
Myths of Mao	392
What is MIM? (article)	285
Three points	207
DC murder	190
Stalin quote on Jews	187