For EffectiveAltruism.org, do you know the search volume for “effective altruism” or related queries? Do you have any sense of how much traffic you could possibly get (e.g., what quantitatively would count as “lots of traffic” vs. “not much traffic”)?
Google estimates that there are 720 searches a month for “effective altruism.” I expect that to increase over time, but I don’t expect search to be the biggest source of traffic initially. I’m expecting that link traffic from people who want a site to explain EA will be the biggest source of traffic initially.
I don’t have a number attached to my expectations about traffic numbers. But, since CEA has a number of web properties, we can benchmark effectivelatruism.org pretty easily by comparing our traffic profile to the traffic profile of other CEA sites. We can use this to figure out whether the site is succeeding or failing from a traffic standpoint.
However, I slightly disagree with Niel that low traffic is the biggest risk. I think the biggest risk is that the site does become the de facto landing page for EA, but the site isn’t very good or doesn’t encourage people to want to get involved. You can get lots of traffic and still not have much of an impact.
I’m working to hedge against this by working with Andy Fallshaw who is an extremely talented designer and branding expert and by A/B testing a wide variety of aspects of the site.
For EffectiveAltruism.org, do you know the search volume for “effective altruism” or related queries? Do you have any sense of how much traffic you could possibly get (e.g., what quantitatively would count as “lots of traffic” vs. “not much traffic”)?
Google estimates that there are 720 searches a month for “effective altruism.” I expect that to increase over time, but I don’t expect search to be the biggest source of traffic initially. I’m expecting that link traffic from people who want a site to explain EA will be the biggest source of traffic initially.
I don’t have a number attached to my expectations about traffic numbers. But, since CEA has a number of web properties, we can benchmark effectivelatruism.org pretty easily by comparing our traffic profile to the traffic profile of other CEA sites. We can use this to figure out whether the site is succeeding or failing from a traffic standpoint.
However, I slightly disagree with Niel that low traffic is the biggest risk. I think the biggest risk is that the site does become the de facto landing page for EA, but the site isn’t very good or doesn’t encourage people to want to get involved. You can get lots of traffic and still not have much of an impact.
I’m working to hedge against this by working with Andy Fallshaw who is an extremely talented designer and branding expert and by A/B testing a wide variety of aspects of the site.