26.10.2011

Rankings and the long statistical tail

Robbie Rix welcomes our extra readers

Thanks mainly to a couple of fantastic donations, our October fund is within touching distance of the £1,250 we need to raise by the end of the month.

Comrade TDB donated a brilliant £200, making use of our online PayPal facility, while comrade SK came up with his regular standing order for £230. Then there were standing orders for £20 (DO), £10 (RP) and £5 (GD), plus a £20 note from comrade PG handed over at our Communist Forum in Manchester last Sunday.

All that comes to £485 and takes our October total to £1,190. Which means we have just four days left to raise at least £60 - preferably a lot more! Why not follow the example of TDB and make your contribution via our website?

Speaking of which, the recent increase in our online readership seems to be holding up - we had 15,673 visitors last week. According to alexa.com, the world’s top ranking website is the famous search engine, Google, followed by Facebook and then Youtube. After these veritable giants there is a very, very long statistical tail. Our website is ranked 1,726,971th in the world over the last three months. Pretty lowly, you might think. But there are an estimated 266,848,493 websites ... and we compare pretty well with, for example, the Socialist Workers Party.

Despite the frequent boasts of the comrades, their site sits more than 100,000 places below ours, at 1,835,549th. About 74% of visits to swp.org.uk are ‘bounces’ (ie, a single page-view only). But the bounce rate for cpgb.org.uk stands at just 42%.

To be honest, the CPGB - and the left as a whole - needs to be doing a lot better. Capitalism is patently failing and only Marxism and the project of working class rule and the transition to global communism can provide a viable alternative. That’s what the SWP and a range of others will tell you too - but only the CPGB and its paper, the Weekly Worker, will tell you that the answer lies not with this or that group alone, but the unity of the revolutionary left into a single, fully democratic, Marxist party.

If we could achieve that it would not only see our global web ranking soar. It would put us in the collective position where the left could at last really begin make a decisive difference organisationally.