We are once again in the process of moving to a new (and more robust) host for the main site, and this gave us the opportunity to look at some user data. A few interesting facts (from last three months) about the main site (not including this blog):
Mises.org harddrive space: 18 GB
Average monthly outgoing bandwidth: 350 GB
Average monthly hits: 13.89 million
Average monthly pages served: 1.3 million
Average monthly visits: 385,000
Average monthly unique visitors: 172,000
Number of podcast users: 9,774
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And who said Austrian weren’t good with numbers? : )
(ducks!)
What’s the difference between a hit and a visit?
Apparently a “visit” is a sequence of hits from the same host during the same day or some other limited period of time.
But the difference between hits and pages served is somewhat more obscure…
For a “fringe” movement, 172000 unique visitors a month is very impressive, and makes me optimistic.
Re Austrian economics being a so-called “fringe movement” — another reason to be optimistic: I’ve always considered the number of people criticizing something a far better measure of that thing’s influence than the number of people arguing in support of it. In that regard, I am heartened by the success of sites like Critiques of Libertarianism (though, strangely, almost all of the critiques of Austrians are written by…Austrians) and books like Kley’s Hayek’s
Social and Political Thought, Haworth’s Anti-Libertarianism, and Barr’s Economics of the Welfare State. Not because I think they are correct — far from it — but because they show that those on the left are thinking about libertarian-Austrian ideas. I also think that by honestly considering and responding to them, Austrians can make good headway within the field (it’s harder to ignore a movement when it’s directly criticizing you!). Mises.org, due to its already high profile, as these statistics demnstrate, would be the perfect hub for a sort of “Critiques of Critiques of Libertarianism” — a place where both Austrians and leftists can easily find counterarguments.
Just my two cents…
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