The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Over 50,000 (pageviews) Served

The various non-profit and political websites I run served up over 50,000 pages in June -- 55,646 to be exact. 19,059 of those pages were served up from this web site right here, while 10,048 were served at StopCarnivore.org, and 12,749 at PNAC.info. FutureSolutions.org led the bottom tier with 4,204 pages, while my barely-existing NoMoreDrugWar.com site had a pitiful 375 pageviews.

Freedom2008.com had 7,059 visits in June, which isn't quite glee-making, but which is an all-time high for the site, and just a hair under 10 times the number of visits a year ago. If I can keep that trend up, the site will have about 600 million visits in June of 2008. That would be nice. ;-)

I don't know if I can keep the traffic increasing tenfold each year, but I am quite confident I can do so this coming year. I fully expect that there will be at least 70,000 visits here in June 2004, which is a pretty darn good start. 700,000 a month in 2005 doesn't seem out of reach either. That would be glee-making...but I'm not willing to predict that one quite yet.

Most of the visits seem to be through search engines -- I am all over Google like a cheap suit, as well as most of the other search sites. You wouldn't believe some of the search terms this site comes up on. I'll post a list some time when I have time to make one up. It seems like people must get drawn in by the title of the site, because people click-through from a lot of searches where this site would not look like a proper result.

Some surprising findings from my stats review:

--E-Actions for Freedom and The Little Brown Reader have been a significant draw -- about 1,200 of this month's pageviews were at those two places. They are only a week and 4 days old respectively, so that's a promising amount of activity. I've posted around 50 entries at the two sites, and I think a lot of traffic is coming in from the various blog collating sites.

--While all but one of my other sites had less than 2 pageviews per visit, Freedom2008.com had almost 3 pageviews per visit on average, which indicates that people are looking around a bit when they get here.

--StopCarnivore.org's results were surprising simply because I haven't done any updating or promoting of that site in quite a while. The interest level there hasn't really flagged much over time, after the initial big rush faded down. That site is easily the overall most-visited of all the non-profit sites I've had.

--My three poetry pages over at FutureSolutions.org had almost 1000 pageviews, which isn't very remarkable, but which strikes me as weird and funny. It's strange to think that thousands of people have read my poems over the years. Strange but true.

--Sadly, there are still not too many non-search sites linking to here, but I think that the coming year will see a serious uptick in such links. One upside to that is that most of my traffic is coming from non-libertarian sources. I'm not really worried about winning over Libertarians -- we already agree, and I plan to win their support largely by my ability to appeal to non-libertarians. If I can hoe that row, I think Libertarians will be happy to support me, and I don't think that getting their attention will be very difficult.

One thing's for sure -- no other 2008 presidential candidate served up almost 20,000 campaign site pages to the voters last month. :-)

The totals above don't include PeoplesForum.com, the web community I run. There, membership went up almost 10% last month, and we had an unprecedented 2.5 million pageviews. If you assume every one of our 7914 members is an active poster -- the reality is probably more like a few thousand of them -- that comes out to a stunning 316 pageviews per member. It's probably actually around five or six hundred pageviews per member. It's good stuff, any way you slice it -- more than twice the traffic of the month before. One of our competitors has been having major server difficulties, and PF (as it's called) has become the refuge for hundreds of new wayward souls.

I'm becoming more convinced that PeoplesForum.com is going to triumph in the web community business simply by being one of the only places that doesn't collapse. I couldn't count all the major web forum places that have come and gone in the time since PF opened on all my fingers and toes. Someday I'm going to write an entry here about "governing" PeoplesForum.com, and what I've learned there. My policies there are very libertarian, in contrast with every other mainstream forum place, and by and large I think people love that fact.

Anyway, there's my web presence update. I think it's looking pretty good at this stage in the game.

I think I'm going to write an entry clarifying some of the things I said yesterday in my "Essential Hurdle for Libertarians" piece. I agree with the things I said, I just feel like I left some things unsaid. That entry kind of wrote itself -- it was actually supposed to be about something entirely different -- the sad state of the Democratic Party and the 2004 candidates. But it took on a life of its own, and I feel like it left some questions unanswered or something. It was listed in Rational Review News Digest today, which means lots of libertarians are probably going to be scrutinizing it -- believe it or not, significant Libertarians were passing around and scrutinizing something I wrote as long as two years ago. And I've learned that if I leave questions unanswered, they will be answered for me, in my absence. One of the primary goals of this site, and a cornerstone of my campaign, is to provide the most open, thorough, and forthright view of who I am and what I'm about that I can. So I'll probably be revising and extending my remarks from the other night, if I can borrow a phrase from our esteemed Congress.