Inside LabourStart

Following up on popular requests (well, Derek), I’ve added some website stats this month.

These should be taken with a grain of salt — actually, a bucket-load of salt.

We are increasingly using Clicky to measure our web traffic and that’s the only system we use on the campaign pages.

The Clicky code has not been placed on every single page on LabourStart.org (the news site), but it should also give a good indication of the number of actual visitors to the live section of the website.

So, why is 1&1 giving a much larger number?

Hard to tell — some of that is, strangely enough, “internal traffic” from 1&1’s own servers, a lot of it will be robots and spammers.

Over time, we’ll put the Clicky code on even more pages on our site to try to make sure that we’re not missing anything, but we’re certainly not missing traffic to our home pages in the various languages.  (Except French, which only moved over to the new system in mid-month, and is therefore missing Clicky stats for the first part of the month.)

Starting next month, we’ll be able to compare, to note any increases if they happen.

Already, interesting to note fairly high traffic from countries which don’t play a big role in our campaigns, but seem to come visit our news pages — Indonesia and India in particular.  I can’t really explain the surge in interest from South Korea to our campaigns pages — it didn’t translate into people signing up to campaigns in Korean, though perhaps they were directed to a different language by a link somewhere.  (75 people from South Korea did sign the English language message to Ban Ki-moon.)

The most important day, all three sets of statistics agree on this, was Monday, 23 September — the day we launched our campaign targetting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.  Somewhere between 12,000 and 34,000 trade unionists visited LabourStart on that day.

New! Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 623,875
Peak day: 34,420 on 23.9
Page impressions: 1,845,122

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 51,799
Peak day: 7,798 on 23.9
Where they come from:
USA – 9,789
Canada – 9,138
UK – 8,469
Indonesia – 4,665
Australia – 3,048
Norway – 1,733
New Zealand – 1,226
India – 1,021
Sweden – 935
Germany – 867

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 42,534
Peak day: 11,817 on 23.9
Where they come from:
Canada – 9,197
UK – 7,119
USA – 6,482
Australia – 2,561
Spain – 1,456
New Zealand – 1,363
Germany – 1,115
South Korea – 1,102
France – 1,091
Belgium – 1,074

Mailing lists

New! Total for all lists: 116,485

[This was 103,324 8 months ago – a net gain of 13,161 new subscribers, or 1,645 per month]

English: 83,741 [81,907]
French: 6,717 [6,443]
Spanish: 4,994 [4,905]
Italian: 4,004 [4,017]
German: 3,323 [3,312]
Turkish: 3,281 [3,283]
Norwegian: 2,472 [2,433]
Russian: 2,093 [2,051]
Dutch: 1,376 [1,377]
Chinese: 1,010 [1,011]
Finnish: 577 [577]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 315 [313]
Polish: 282 [282]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Portuguese: 247 [248]
Hebrew: 225 [215]
Farsi: 213 [207]
Swedish: 193 [195]
Indonesian: 163 [153]
Korean 154 [154]
Danish: 137 [137]
Czech: 88 [88]
Thai: 68 [68]
Esperanto: 61 [55]
Greek: 60 [60]
Hindi: 40 [40]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 19 [19]
Creole: 13 [13]
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –

English: 10,266 [10,033]
Canada English: 2,289 [2167]
Canada French: 234 [219]
French: 187
Spanish: 59
USA: 31 New!
Japanese: 23
German: 15
Russian: 15
Portuguese: 7

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English):7,925 [7,832]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,936 [5,689]
Like LabourStart page (French): 340 [329]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 127 [126]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 99 [97]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,627 [5,610]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,403 [1,383]

Union group on Flickr: 734 [732]

Website

Correspondents: 663 [670]

Some highlights this month (keeping in mind that August is normally a very quiet month):

• We have finally reached 10,000 followers on Twitter – our global, English feed.
• More people are joining our group on Facebook (58) than liking our page (39).

Mailing lists

English: 81,907 [81,875]
French: 6,443 [6,413]
Spanish: 4,905 [4,886]
Italian: 4,017 [4,021]
German: 3,312 [3,295]
Turkish: 3,283 [3,284]
Norwegian: 2.433 [2,441]
Russian: 2,051 [2,049]
Dutch: 1,377 [1,359]
Chinese: 1,011 [1,011]
Finnish: 577 [575]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 313 [313]
Polish: 282 [282]
Tagalog: 254 [253]
Portuguese: 248 [245]
Hebrew: 215 [217]
Farsi: 207 [207]
Swedish: 195 [195]
Korean 154 [154]
Indonesian: 153 [152]
Danish: 137 [137]
Czech: 88 [88]
Thai: 68 [68]
Greek: 60
Esperanto: 55 [52]
Hindi: 40 [39]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 19
Creole: 13
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 10,033 [9,936]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,832 [7,793]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,689 [5,631]
Like LabourStart page (French): 329 [324]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 126 [124]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 97 [94]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,610 [5,594]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,383 [1,376]

Union group on Flickr: 732 [729]

Website

Correspondents: 670 [665]

This report has been delayed by about ten days due to my holiday.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains (100 or more) are highlighted in bold.

Highlights:

• German has moved up to being our 5th largest mailing list.
• We have a new mailing list – in Hindi.
• For the first time ever, the top five languages have over 100,000 subscribers — that’s English, French, Spanish, Italian and German.
• The total of all active lists is now 113,976.
• We’re just under 10,000 followers on Twitter – and we should reach that goal any day now.
• More people sign up to follow us on Twitter than like us on Facebook — by nearly two-to-one.
• Our Facebook group is growing much faster than our ‘likes’ for our page.

Mailing lists

English: 81,875 [80,623]
French: 6,413 [6,162]
Spanish: 4,886 [4,750]
Italian: 4,021 [3,990]
German: 3,295 [3,199]
Turkish: 3,284 [3,279]
Norwegian: 2,441 [2,438]
Russian: 2,049 [2,046]
Dutch: 1,359 [1,320]
Chinese: 1,011 [1,011]
Finnish: 575 [573]
Japanese: 334 [333]
Arabic: 313 [312]
Polish: 282 [281]
Tagalog: 253 [231]
Portuguese: 245 [244]
Hebrew: 217 [209]
Farsi: 207 [207]
Swedish: 195 [196]
Korean 154 [153]
Indonesian: 152 [141]
Danish: 137 [138]
Czech: 88 [88]
Thai: 68 [68]
Esperanto: 52 [50]
Hindi: 39
Slovak: 19
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9,936 [9,710]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,793 [7,673]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,631 [5,433]
Like LabourStart page (French): 324 [318]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 124 [112]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 94 [83]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,594 [5,557]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,376 [1,348]

Union group on Flickr: 729 [728]

Website

Correspondents: 665 [649]

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains (100 or more) are highlighted in bold.

Highlights:

• We now have 10 lists with 1,000 subscribers or more.
• The Dutch list grew by more than 50% – a spectacular growth.
• On Facebook, our Group continues to grow – by over 250 a month – despite no efforts by us to promote it. Within a few days, it will probably even be larger than UnionBook, which is growing very slowly.
• We’re picking 9 – 10 new Twitter followers every day (doing almost nothing to promote this) and as a result, we should reach 10,000 Twitter followers sometime in July.

Mailing lists

English: 80,623 [79,267] +1,356
French: 6,162 [6,046] +116
Spanish: 4,750 [4,660] +90
Italian: 3,990 [3,957] +33
Turkish: 3,279 [3,209] +70
German: 3,199 [2,906] +293
Norwegian: 2,438 [2,407] +31
Russian: 2,046 [1,962] +84
Dutch: 1,320 [879] +441
Chinese: 1,011 [828] +183
Finnish: 573 [560] +13
Japanese: 333 [300] +33
Arabic: 312 [299] +13
Polish: 281 [313] -32
Portuguese: 244 [241] +3
Tagalog: 231 [232] -1
Hebrew: 209 [207] +2
Farsi: 207 [213] -6
Swedish: 196 [178] +18
Korean 153 [154] -1
Danish: 138 [143] -5
Indonesian: 141 [128] +13
Czech: 88 [89] -1
Thai: 68 [67] +1
Esperanto: 50 [39] +11
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9.710 [9,435] +275

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,673 [7,172] +501
Members of LabourStart group: 5,433 [5,180] +253
Like LabourStart page (French): 318 [312] +6
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 112 [102] +10
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 83 [75] +8

UnionBook –
Members: 5,557 [5,530] +27

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,348 [1,317] +31

Union group on Flickr: 728 [724] +4

Website

Correspondents: 649 [640] +9

Our latest ad campaign on Facebook is now closed.  We spent US $336.89, showed our ad to 75,546 people, and picked up 773 new likes for our page.  In other words, each new like cost us about 50 US cents.  We’re now up to 7,585 likes for our page.  To reach 10,000 (getting another 2,415 likes) would cost us $1,200.  There is very little evidence to show that these new likes translate well into participants in our campaigns, correspondents, translators, or donors.  Any thoughts on whether we should continue to invest in Facebook ads?

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains (50 or more) are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 79,267 [78,105] +1,162
French: 6,046 [6,044]
Spanish: 4,660 [4,535] +125
Italian: 3,957 [3,914]
Turkish: 3,209 [3,208]
German: 2,906 [2,847] +59
Norwegian: 2,407 [2,390]
Russian: 1,962 [1,922]
Dutch: 879 [882]
Chinese: 828 [817]
Finnish: 560 [536]
Polish: 313 [314]
Japanese: 300 [262]
Arabic: 299 [299]
Portuguese: 241 [242]
Tagalog: 232 [228]
Farsi: 213 [213]
Hebrew: 207 [211]
Swedish: 178 [179]
Korean 154 [154]
Danish: 143 [144]
Indonesian: 128 [126]
Czech: 89 [89]
Thai: 67
Esperanto: 39
Vietnamese: 12

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9,435 [9,177] +258

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,172 [6,596] +576
Members of LabourStart group: 5,180 [5,102] +78
Like LabourStart page (French): 312 [305]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 102 [102]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 75 [70] – new page launched this month

UnionBook –
Members: 5,530 [5,507]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,317 [1,272]

Union group on Flickr: 724 [721]

Website

Correspondents: 640 [633]

Some highlights:

• Mailing lists growing quickly (100 or more new subscribers this month) include English, French, and Chinese.
• Big growth on social networks (100 or more new ones this month) are our Facebook page and group in English and our Twitter feed in English.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 78,105 [76,648]
French: 6,044 [5,868]
Spanish: 4,535 [4,462]
Italian: 3,914 [3,888]
Turkish: 3,208 [3,116]
German: 2,847 [2,798]
Norwegian: 2,390 [2,369]
Russian: 1,922 [1,951]
Dutch: 882 [885]
Chinese: 817 [717]
Finnish: 536 [548]
Polish: 314 [318]
Arabic: 299 [267]
Japanese: 262 [240]
Portuguese: 242 [246]
Tagalog: 228 [205]
Farsi: 213 [207]
Hebrew: 211 [209]
Swedish: 179 [183]
Korean 154 [150]
Danish: 144 [144]
Indonesian: 126 [116]
Czech: 89 [96]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9,177 [8,881]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 6,596 [6,387]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,102 [4,925]
Like LabourStart page (French): 305 [294]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 102 [96]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 70 [0] – new page launched this month

UnionBook –
Members: 5,507 [5,481]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,272 [1,233]

Union group on Flickr: 721 [720]

Website

Correspondents: 633 [624]

As I may have already mentioned, people at the recent e-Campaigning Forum talked up Reddit as a way to bring traffic to websites.

It costs nothing, so why not?

Basically, when creating a campaign (or translating one), make sure to go to Reddit’s ‘labor’ section, login (you should create an account for yourself first), and add the link to the campaign.

After you’ve done so, Reddit will show a “shortlink” that will look like this: http://redd.it/1bih7f

Modify the campaign and in the “Reddit_URL” field, paste in that shortlink.

You’ll know you’ve done it correctly if the Reddit icon then appears on your campaign, underneath the Facebook and Google ones on the right side of the page.

The biggest news:

I just set up CloudFlare as a way of ensuring that LabourStart stays online no matter what.  It should also theoretically really speed up the display of our site, anywhere in the world.  It should kick in sometime in the next 48 hours.  If LabourStart suddenly becomes unusable  that probably means I did something wrong with the setup. In that case, please email me making sure not to use a labourstart.org address — email me at labourstart@fastmail.fm, which will get through.  Make sure you note that email address now, as this blog will also become inaccessible if our site goes offline.

Other news:

Facebook: We have a new Hebrew language Facebook page, updated daily and picking up followers fairly quickly.  We’re up to 48 likes.  We also have pages in Turkish (99 likes), French (300 likes) and English (6,441 likes).  We only have 209 people on our Hebrew language mailing list, so this is quite good — 1 in 4 are now Facebook fans.  If we had the same result in English, we’d have something like 19,000 fans on Facebook.

New home page: The new home page is now working in 11 languages and should be working in all 29 by the end of this week.  Following a vigorous discussion about the logo, we’ll make a decision in the next few days.

New pages for countries and state/provinces: This is also being configured according to the new design, and hugely improved.  See for example the new UK home page at http://www.labourstart.org.uk.

Campaigns: The Hong Kong dock workers remains our latest, with over 7,300 messages sent so far, though we will likely be launching a new one today for the ITF.  We’ve added a prominent link on campaigns to Reddit which, according to participants in the recent e-Campaigning Forum, can be a very effective way to boost traffic to a site (at no cost).  Two of our oldest campaigns — Nissan USA and the Philippines — have been closed.  A new version of a Canada-only campaign has also been launched, with over 600 messages this week.

Mailing lists: We now have a mailing list in Thai with 49 subscribers, and our first campaign in that language.

Book: We’re nearly done with the writing of our introduction to the global labour movement — we hope to go to press this Friday and have copies ready for sale by 4th May, when we hold the LabourStart May Day party in London.

May Day party:  This important fund-raising event takes place on 4th May this year at the Bread & Roses pub in London.  I’m hoping to raise up to £1,000 pounds.  So far, over 200 people have either confirmed their attendance or said they may come (slightly more say they will definitely come).  The general secretary of the ITF is due to speak, as are others.  Two performers have volunteered to provide the entertainment for the evening — Dave Thorpe and The Ruby Kid.

Today in Labour History: Edd’s added many more items, as we need to ensure that we have at least one for each month for each of the major countries.  This appears on the bottom of our UK page, if you want to see what it looks like.  Comrades who can help should contact us intern@labourstart.org

Dormant languages: We’ve identified 11 languages where correspondents have ceased posting news — we’ll need to chase them up and find replacements, but if comrades have any suggestions they’d be most welcome.  The languages are:

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 76,648 [76,322]
French: 5,868 [5,893]
Spanish: 4,462 [4,504]
Italian: 3,888 [3,888]
Turkish: 3,116 [3,116]
German: 2,798 [2,614]
Norwegian: 2,369 [2,369]
Russian: 1,951 [1,951]
Dutch: 885 [885]
Chinese: 717 [716]
Finnish: 548 [546]
Polish: 318 [318]
Arabic: 267 [252]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese: 240 [240]
Hebrew: 209 [208]
Farsi: 207 [207]
Tagalog: 205 [205]
Swedish: 183 [183]
Korean 150 [150]
Danish: 144 [144]
Indonesian : 116 [109]
Czech: 96 [96]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 8,881 [8,659]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 6,387 [6,327]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,925 [4,909]
Like LabourStart page (French): 294 [279]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 96 [92]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,481 [5,440]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,233 [1,194]

Union group on Flickr: 720 [720]

Website

Correspondents: 624 [613]