How many hits do the hits of different EA sites get each year?

By Nathan Young @ 2021-03-04T16:34 (+8)

Presumably this information is public but spread out.

If you know how many hits an EA website got last year, please post it here.

Even better, a link to a public analytics site.

RyanCarey @ 2021-03-04T19:08 (+19)

You can start by looking at the Alexa engagement ranking - lower rank is (superlinearly) better:

nickbostrom.com: 367k

effectivealtruism.org: 187k

givewell.org: 140k

80000hours.org: 122k

slatestarcodex.com: 91k

lesswrong.com: 46k

etc.

kokotajlod @ 2021-03-05T11:06 (+2)

Whoa, Lesswrong beats SSC? That surprises me. 

JJ Hepburn @ 2021-03-05T13:38 (+5)

I'd expect Lesswrong and EA Forum to be quite high. 
But it depends what metric you are thinking of. Forums have a lot of active content compared to the other sites that are not updated as often. Forums probably have lower Unique User numbers and higher Page Views compared to these other sites

Darius_Meissner @ 2021-03-04T22:25 (+13)

Wikipedia pageviews could serve as a useful indicator that I expect is strongly correlated with website views.

E.g. see the following comparison of the pageviews of several EA-related Wikipedia pages in 2020. As it turns out, Peter Singer gets about 2x the number of views of Nick Bostrom, 2.5x of effective altruism, and 12x FHI or GiveWell.

Peter_Hurford @ 2021-03-09T08:25 (+7)

"Is EA Growing? EA Growth Metrics for 2018" has some data on this, and I look forward to doing it again for 2019-2020

Luke Freeman @ 2021-03-26T03:31 (+2)

Giving What We Can for 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2020:

Effective Altruism Australia for 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2020:

BrianTan @ 2021-03-05T02:02 (+2)

I remember finding the data from ahrefs.com about EA sites interesting. You can get a 7-day free trial of it if you haven't tried it out. I can't remember if it had data on number of views, but it had data on what links rank high based on certain keywords or topics, such as "effective altruism", on search engines.

erikaalonso @ 2021-03-16T18:34 (+1)

Keeping in mind that website traffic stats are not exact, here are the numbers I have from Animal Charity Evaluators for Jan 01 - Dec 31 2020.

Users: 160,508

Sessions: 214,433

Pageviews: 430,692

JJ Hepburn @ 2021-03-05T13:30 (+1)

AI Safety Support only started mid last year so hard to get a clear picture

So 1405 Sessions and 2627 Page view second half of 2020.

Nathan Young @ 2021-03-04T16:34 (+1)

I guess that this site will be the biggest by at least 10x.

finm @ 2021-03-04T17:09 (+11)

By 'this site' do you mean the forum or all the other resources on effectivealtruism.org? In either case, if the 80,000 Hours site counts as an EA site then I highly doubt that! My guess is that the answer is going to depend on how wide the catchment is for 'EA site', but most construals are going to put 80K right out in front. Maybe GiveWell is up there, plus the GWWC site and The Life You Can Save. I also think that Nick Bostrom's personal site gets a surprising number of hits. I would guess the forum is middling to top around these sites? Very interested in being proved wrong about that!

Obviously all these sites have their own numbers, but I haven't seem them pooled together in some publicly available resource (nor am I sure that would be useful). I do know of some exact numbers but don't think it would be sensible to share them without permission. Unfortunately, in my experience it's also not totally straightforward to glean those stats from the outside, although search engine rankings etc are a good proxy.

Aaron Gertler @ 2021-03-10T06:43 (+5)

From 80,000 Hours' 2019 annual review:

From January - December 2020, the Forum had 168,000 unique users. So 80K "wins" by an order of magnitude (and as FinM notes, there are other sites that may be bigger than the Forum; GiveWell had ~600,000 unique users in 2018).

Nathan Young @ 2021-03-10T13:21 (+3)

fwiw I said hits, not unique users. I am not surprised that 80k has more uniques.

Aaron Gertler @ 2021-03-10T17:54 (+6)

Sorry for misinterpreting "biggest" — I just failed at basic reading comprehension :-(

FWIW, the Forum had roughly 1.2 million hits, so 80K's count of unique users is still higher than that number, and I'd guess their hits are at least double that.