Following crazy record-setting months in June and July (I was on vacation in early August, so I didn't write that up), August has proven that Daily Kos is the place to be during heavy news periods. First up, let's look at the traffic chart:
Daily Kos had nearly 8.5 million unique visitors during the month, and 41.7 million pageviews. That compares with 7.3 million uniques and 37.5 million pageviews in July.
Our previous record-setting month, October 2012 during the height of that year's presidential season? 6.8 million uniques and and nearly 57 million pageviews. So okay, people were visiting more frequently and clicking on more stories that October, but we now have significantly more unique visitors. In summer. During our traditional "slow" part of the year. It's mind-boggling.
Ferguson. Now part of the reason for that traffic was the tragedy in Ferguson, and truth be told, I'd trade that traffic away if we could go back in time and avoid what happened. But the reality is that when something big came down, we were there to cover the injustice and the people bravely standing up to the robo-cops, talking about issues of racism and militarization of the police. This site became a focal rallying point for people wanting to get informed about what was happening, and I'm proud that we were able to play that role. And we're not done with that story, not until Ferguson's Republican mayor is gone, and the city has a representative government and police force.
Mobile. Look at that chart up above again. Note the difference between the light and dark blues. The dark blue is mobile traffic, the light blue is web traffic. In July, for the first time ever, we had more mobile (3.7M) traffic than web (3.6M). This month, the gap between mobile (4.4M) and web (4M) expanded even further. Our web traffic may be inching up, but the real growth is in mobile devices. That means that after we're finished with the DK5 launch (beta launching "soon", fully launching after the election), we're going to have to put some serious effort into our mobile experience.
In fact, get this: taking into consideration ALL traffic, Daily Kos is the 284th largest site on the entire internet (among US browsers). But our mobile site is the 134th largest, larger than TMZ's mobile site, or Fandango's, or NBC's, or Politico's, or Oprah's.
Email action list. We're no longer just a website, or a mobile site. Our email action list has grown so large, it's now one of the largest in the (non-campaign) progressive movement. As of the end of August, the list is 1.6 million strong, which means it has literally doubled in size every year for the last three four years. That list gives us the ability to create massive pressure when necessary. For example, check out this report from the Sunlight Foundation on the 800,000 public comments the FCC received on its Net Neutrality plan. Of those comments that Sunlight could directly source to their sponsorship organization, fully 10 percent of them came from Daily Kos, making us the fourth largest source of pro-Net-Neutrality energy (behind CREDO, Battle for the Net, and EFF).
Facebook: Our job is to spread our message and info and activism energy into as many platforms as possible. And since gazillions of people are on Facebook, we are on Facebook too. And we are on there something fierce. Currently, 600,000 people have liked our Facebook page.
But what's crazy is that we have more people talking about Daily Kos content on Facebook than we have likes. Currently, that's over 800K. I dare you to find anyone else who can boast that. For example, Upworthy has 6.9M likes, and yet only 1.3M people talking about their content. Huffington Post has 4M likes, yet just 1.8M people talking about it. I was once cornered at a conference by a Facebook data analyst who said they were studying Daily Kos to figure out what we were doing so effectively. Never found out the results of their study, but the numbers are stark.
And what's more, Facebook balances out our readership nicely. Daily Kos proper, if Quantcast can be believed (and I've seen other metrics suggesting different numbers, so it's all kinda hazy), has our male-female ratio as 61-39. But for those participating on Facebook, it's 39-60 -- the exact reverse. Amazing, huh?
All these numbers represent huge gains from previous months, and we should keep seeing this kind of growth through the election. I'm going to try really hard to write these update posts every months, whether the news is good or bad. We're due for some down months at some point, probably November and December after the election. But then again, summer was supposed to be our down time. Things are suddenly too crazy to predict.
In fact, part of the reason we're holding off launch of the new site until after the election is that we're afraid of running an untested code base under loads that already exceed our previous highs. We know our current site can handle the heavy traffic, so keeping Daily Kos up and running has become the current priority.
Update: That big upward spike in the all-time chart above makes it hard to see how much bigger August was than July, so here's a one-year chart, with me marking where July left off.