After August's record-setting month, we got a bit of pullback in the numbers of uniques:
September's 7.35 million unique visitors was over a million fewer than August's 8.46 million. And you know what? It was still our
second best month ever. And those visitors generated 37 million pageviews. All of this as we enter the heaviest traffic month of almost every year -- pre-election October. (Octobers represent a disproportionately large number of the spikes in the chart above.)
Traffic drivers. Last month, Ferguson drove a big chunk of the site's traffic as people turned to Daily Kos to follow the news. There wasn't any such news story to drive September, no big viral hit to drive outsized traffic. The coming election was likely a catalyst, but election-themed news didn't particularly share well or generate extra engagement (such as comments). It may be that this is the site's baseline traffic levels when nothing major is happening. We'll find out for sure one way or another after the election.
Mobile. Last month, 55 percent of the site's traffic came from mobile devices. This month, it was 48 percent, a fairly significant drop. So what happened? See above -- viral traffic arrives disproportionately from mobile devices, people accessing Twitter and Facebook from their phones. So given the lack of massive viral growth, I guess it makes sense that mobile growth was arrested. But expect that to be a blip, since the long-term trends are still toward mobile.
Email action list. At the end of August, our email action list was at 1.6 million, which was literally double from the previous 12 months. One month later, it ended at exactly 1.776 million, because it loves America. It really is amazing seeing this list continue to grow so rapidly. There's a phenomenon with political lists -- getting to the first million is a lot easier than growing it beyond that point. The reason is that even a 2-3 percent unsubscribe rate (not unheard of when emailing people) means having to replace those lost subscribers with a fresh 20-30,000 new ones. So most political lists end up hovering perpetually around that 1 million mark. Not ours. Two million by the end of the year isn't out of the question.
We are now sending two "share" emails every day. These are emails compiling the hottest stories on Daily Kos (I'd say about 95 percent community written), then blasting them to (most) people on the list. And our list members love them. There's the unscientific proof -- I get more compliments about the share email from random people than anything else we do. And then there's the actual proof: Those share emails now generate about 3.5 million pageviews per week. It's a big part of our traffic growth, and it's the single best method to build a wider audience for our best community-written material.
This one-two-three punch, community-activism-editorial, gives us a huge organizing advantages shared by absolutely no one else in the activism space. It's a big reason, if not the biggest, for the site's overall meteoric growth.
Facebook. Our Facebook likes are at 619,000, up from just under 600,000 last month. That's a slower growth rate than what we're used to. See again above about the lack of viral breakthroughs. Or maybe election-themed content we're focused on isn't as sexy to a more general audience. Or maybe it has something to do with Facebook's algorithms, which was recently tweaked. Before the tweak, we were averaging 11,000 new likes per week, we're now at 4,500. And no, we're not complaining. Most sites would kill for that kind of growth. And we always bounce back strongly after such tweaks.
Community. Neeta's efforts to establish on-the-ground groups of Daily Kos readers has meshed nicely with the activism team. For example, the San Francisco contingent visited Dianne Feinstein's office to lobby on Net Neutrality, while the LA contingent lobbied the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners for better worker safety conditions. And this was pretty cool!
You can check to see if there are any local events near you here, find a group to join here, and if your local area is barren, you can always contact Neeta/Navajo to help get a new group started.
Headcount. Daily Kos is now at 32 employees. We've got 10 in editorial, nine in technology, six in activism, three in social media, Neeta in community, and three at HQ (me, our general manager, and a brand new director of finance). Pretty crazy, huh? I remember back when it was me. Then me and Jeremy the developer. Now we have a gaggle. Or is it a flock? Maybe a murder? Fuck it, I'll make up a new word: It's an awesomeness of employees!
Here's a tip for anyone running a company with more than a few employees -- Slack. It's an inter-office communications tool, and it has dramatically improved the way we all interact internally with each other. Unpaid and unsolicited commercial finished.