Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Site statistics

March was our first month without Project Syndicate content, and thus with the published article count down from 25 in February to 14 in March.  Published comments were not down to the same extent, falling from 974 in February to 799 in March - a slightly larger fall than it looks, as the month was three days longer.

However, total traffic to the site was significantly up on February, even allowing for the three extra days, with unique visitors up nearly 50% at 25,277, and total visitors up 44% at just under 50,000 - the highest single day recording 2726 visitors and more than 112,000 hits. Two articles accounted for a large proportion of the extra traffic (although attracting very few comments): Richard's Woomera article, via its inclusion on Google News; and Melody's Lost in Laos, which gained traffic from diverse sources including ecoclub.com and the Vientiane Times - the latter two sites accounted for the great majority of the referred traffic from others.

We didn’t publish 50 abusive, content-free or incomprehensible comments, and 15 under the 5-post rule. Total intended for publication and not published: 65/864=7.5%.

Finances

Income in March was $335 in donations and $214.14 from Google Adsense - total $549.14, versus expenditure of $320.93. Adsense March running total was just on USD60, probably to be received as income in May.

Our forward monthly running expenses are now only $13 for bank fees, plus a couple of small annual payments, versus a bank balance of $731.81, so I'll only normally report on finances quarterly from here on.