Troll Watch for April 1, 2022

 Today's information is not specifically about trolls but about the web traffic on Free Republic. 

A little disclaimer first: This information is not sourced from anyone who has anything to do with Free Republic. It is all open sourced data that anyone with some technical skill can obtain on their own. 

From January 1, 2022 to April 1, 2022 Free Republic had 9,977,000 unique visits. It is a very busy site! 

46.10% of the visitors were using desktop computers and 53.90% were using mobile devices. 

Free Republic is globally ranked as the world's 20,535th busiest web site. 

Free Republic is the USA's 4,001st busiest web site. 

Free Republic has no public facing subdomains. 

Free Republic had 321,548 unique visitors in March 2022. Only 29.34% of these visited the site once. The rest visited numerous times with an average visit of 11 minutes and 12 seconds. 

In March 96.19% of the unique visitors to Free Republic came from IP addresses in the United States. This is an increase of 7.56% over the previous month. 

The next most popular countries for site visitors are as follows:

Canada .84%

Thailand .43%

UK .23%

Brazil .18%

Australia .17%

Russia .04%

China .03%

There were unique visits from 79 different countries in March 2022. 

Now on to what I'd been looking for the most:

86.12% of the visits from January 1, 2022 to April 1, 2022 were directly from known individual or organizational IP addresses. 13.88% were from known VPN services and the IP of origin was masked. 

Meaning that at least some of the traffic showing as US traffic is probably originating in other countries. 

That is all. 

Comments

  1. AnonymousApril 4, 2022 at 1:57 PM

    Look forward to reading your findings!

    ReplyDelete
  2. A Simple ManJune 8, 2022 at 9:22 AM

    "This information is not sourced from anyone who has anything to do with Free Republic. It is all open sourced data that anyone with some technical skill can obtain on their own."

    If by 'technical skill' you mean using an analytics platform like Similarweb, Semrush, Ahrefs, or any other website that did what Alexa.com did (before it was taken offline in May 2022), then sure.

    What would really certify your expertise (if your data is truly open source) is to showcase your methods, so that those with similar technical skill can duplicate your results.

    "Meaning that at least some of the traffic showing as US traffic is probably originating in other countries."

    And this means what, exactly?

    Is it a new phenomenon, unique to 2022? That there are foreign visitors or users of Free Republic is somehow a revelation?

    That 13.88% visitors were traced to VPN services or masked IPs means...what, exactly? Are there no Americans who use VPNs or mask their IPs? Your apparent implication is that the majority of VPN users are from non-American accounts, when this is by no means obvious. With the passage of time and greater concerns over one's online privacy, that there should be a greater percentage of VPN/masked IPs is only to be expected.

    And what would said foreigners on Free Republic be doing? Are their purposes unanimously nefarious? That seems to be your implication; do you have any proof to back that up?

    ReplyDelete

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