So How Are We Doing?

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I thought it might be useful to take stock of how much attention the new databases released by Center for Responsive Politics (Congressional Personal Financial Disclosure and Travel) and OMB Watch (Government Grants and Contracts) attracted last week. 

From Massie Ritsch at CRP:

In the first six days that the new personal finances and travel databases were online OpenSecrets.org logged nearly 140,000 unique visitors (though some may have visited over multiple days). OS logged more than 1.6 million page views and more than 7 million hits in that time.

Last week, the Personal Financial Disclosure database was within our top 5 most popular features. The travel site was within the top 20, which is still impressive measured against campaign finance features that have been mainstays of the website for years.

Oct. 10, the day we unveiled these databases, and Oct. 11 were the 7th and 8th busiest days ever on OpenSecrets.org, based on unique visitors. The site has not experienced such traffic since just days before the 2004 presidential election. Our peak last week was Wednesday, Oct. 11: 28,592 unique visitors, 348,443 page views and 1,631,576 hits.

 From Gary Bass at OMB Watch:

From last Tuesday through Sunday, we had 20,502 visits (or 207,436 page views, if you like big numbers — and over 900,000 hits if for some reason you like to monitor hits). Total bandwidth over that period has been 18.4 GB.  (By comparison, OMBW’s site, which gets an average of 45,000 monthly visitors, peaked at 15.3 GB for the month of August.) 

There are at least 300 web links referring people to FedSpending.org, many of them from blogs.  Some of the top referring sites are Gov Exec, Instapundit, MetaFilter, TPM Muckraker, Captains Quarters, and Wash Post.

And one of Sunlight’s other major projects – Congresspedia, our joint effort with Center for Media and Democracy – is also posting some new big numbers:

From Conor Kenny, editor of Congresspedia:

 
WOW! SourceWatch hit 75,000 visitors yesterday (280,00 pages served). It’s impossible to separate the statistics for SourceWatch and Congresspedia (since Congresspedia is built on top of the SourceWatch wiki) , but either way it’s a good thing. This is up from about 28,000 visitors per day in the month before Congresspedia debuted.

I think this is a record, but brace yourselves: 56,000 on Saturday, 66,000 on Sunday, and 75,000 yesterday.

Folks, this is just the beginning.