While having lunch in a local Bangladeshi restaurant in Atlanta, I couldn’t help but overhear a fellow dinner, at the next table, citing Murray Rothbard while discussing natural vs. government granted monopolies. I couldn’t believe it. A casual conversation, between four friends in the outskirts of Atlanta, in which the name Murray Rothbard was invoked! Given that most people who hear me say “Austrian” think I am mispronouncing Australian, it was a wonderful thing to hear the name Murray Rothbard outside of an official Mises Institute event.
I thought the odds of such a thing occurring had to be astonishingly low, as it happens, I couldn’t have been more wrong. During 2009, Mises.org received 8.7 million visits worldwide; 42% of them were new visitors! As shown below, the Mises Institute is helping to disseminate Austrian principles to every corner of the country.
Visits by State
Top visits by city 2009
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The People’s Republics of California and New York dominate the list? Who’d a thunk? Perhaps there is more of a remnant in both states than I had thought.
Two of the most populated states having the most new traffic should be no surprise to anyone. I’m surprised Texas wasn’t the biggest contributor, know some of the proclivities of folks in that state.
I was pleased to see 29,000 visits made up of 34% new visitors coming out of Pittsburgh. I will be there in a couple of weeks and I sure hope that I overhear conversations like the one heard in Atlanta!
We have recently created small Mises Circle in Tallinn, Estonia. I knew about 6-7 people who had been exposed to Austrian economics before but was surprised to see new (young) people popping up in forums and newspapers, promoting these ideas. Anyway, after getting these new people together I was surprised again to see some comments in a newspaper to article about economic theory. The comments were advising to read Human Action and visit mises.org. And none of “our” guys admitted posting them.
Lot of people are finding the mises.org on their own and this is not only happening in US. Keep it going and soon our numbers have doubled.
Thats a start. Across the pond here in Sweden all the austrians are on the internets. The newspapers and government are ruled by socialist scumbags and everyone votes for the same thing and no one has a clue about economics. The most abused word when it comes to politics is solidarity. Pretty awesome indeed. People can’t even spell to freedom here.
Nearly 75,000 from Sweden. Be sure to read Per Bylund’s article on How the Welfare State Corrupted Sweden.
There were over 7,000 visits last year from Estonia, almost 500 of those were from Tallinn. Looks like you are doing good work over there.
In order to spread the Institute’s outreach amongst Spanish-speaking countries, why not cooperate with Euribe? He already voluntarily translates all the pieces published on Mises Daily, so why not make the material more accessible for Spanish speakers?
Jonathan, we cooperate with all non-English speakers by giving blanket permission and encouragement for the translation of anything and everything, plus the use of all publicly available imagery and databases and everything else. We don’t have a sector of Mises.org for non-English speakers simply because we couldn’t possibly maintain it or assure its quality. It makes sense for specialists in other languages to start and maintain separate sites – and this has long happened. In other words, anyone can establish a site in any language and use all material here. It’s the best way we know to spread the universal message.
Fair enough!
Are these unique people visiting? If I check the site 3 times a day, that would be over 1,000 visits a year from me alone. Do I count as one visit or 1,000?
What is the source of the data (physical address, IP)? If IP, then the data might not be accurate; the visitor could be using TOR or a VPN.
Over 3.7 million absolute unique visitors. The absolute unique visitor metric counts each IP address only once during a given period (in this case 2009).
This doesn’t come as too large of a shock to me. Since attending college, I have already heard professors mention Hazlitt, Bastiat, and Hayek. They were utterly confused as to the principles these men espoused, but they were mentioned nonetheless. Plus, I made sure they would never make the mistake of misrepresenting them again.
If the map was corrected for state population it would be better – California must have 100 times more people than N. Dakota so naturally it would have more visitors. Corrected in this way, one could make more interesting speculations. Are citizens of Taxachussetts more or less likely to read about liberty than Texans? And so on.
“The People’s Republics of California and New York dominate the list? Who’d a thunk?”
Well, California makes sense, since it DOES have 10% of America’s population, and in New York you have NYC with Wall Street and the like, so it makes sense that the site would draw heavy interest.
I’d like to see my home state of Ohio looking a little darker, though. The statist agenda has dominated the great lakes area for far too long.
i think new zealands gona have political leaders who follow mises in a few years if the youth movements of the act party national party and libertrianz are a good sign.i even managed to convert a friend of the green party co leader.
It’s great to see my home state of California lit up like that. Is it any coincidence that the highest amount of interest in Austrian economics are from the two states that are the most oppressively taxed and the closest to falling off a cliff?
All traffic patterns are distorted like that, NY and Cali have high population therefore more people. Not necessarily more Austrian visitors per capita.
I am not a US citizen and I am a regular visitor. I have learnt a lot here and corrected several of my misconceptions. I try to persuade whoever is willing to listen to visit Mises.org. It would be interesting to see a graphic for the whole world. I would love to see the day when Mises.org is popular across continents, more so in a country like mine where having socialist ideals in equated with being moral.
Here is a list of libertarian meetup groups in The United States (and some in other countries):
http://www.vforvoluntary.com/wiki/LibertarianMeetupGroups#United%20States
My hometown Pittsburgh includes two radio hosts who are known to read mises.org and pass good stuff along to their listeners: Dimitri Vassilouris and Jim Quinn.
I live in Atlanta and can be overheard on a pretty regular basis turning people onto the Mises Institute. Thank you so much for all you do!
terry-freeman,
Is that the same Jim Quinn who sends out theburningplatform.com?
I wish more people from the Bluegrass state had visited Mises.org……………… o’well. Spit in one hand and wish in the other as the old saying goes.
So many people on welfare and unemployment around here (the city I live) its not even funny. *Sighs* I can only imagine how it is else where in the state.
But its great news none the less to hear that more people were checking out mises.org. Makes me happy. Bright bit of news in an otherwise gloomy forecast.
I do my part in Louisiana but I’m pleased to see so much traffic from California and New York.
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