Comments

• listserv membership peaked at a little over 4000. By that point, volume, attacks on Obama, and promotions of candidates like Nader had gotten so intense that people started unsubscribing -- about 20% in a day. We introduced moderation, which helped substantially, but requires huge amounts of time from volunteer moderators. The drop in listserv continued a trend that began on 7/10; we did an experiment on 7/11 to see if moderation is still needed and results are in retrospect inconclusive.
  
• not sure how to explain the absurdly high Google numbers for 7/12 and 7/13. The last time we had checked, the evening of July 2, there were only 1820 hits. Coverage exploded after then; but it's still increasing, and so an 80% drop between 7/13 and 7/14 makes no sense. The 38,000 number on 7/14 seems much more plausible than the much larger numbers over the weekend so our current best guess is that there was some kind of glitch. Hard to know ... we had another Google outlier on 7/16 ... odd.
  

Methodology:

• most numbers are availabe directly from the links at the top of the relevant column.
  • For Facebook numbers, you have to be logged in to Facebook -- sorry about that.
• the number of current subscribers is at the bottom of each email message to the group. does this include people receiving in digest form?
• counts for the open letter and spank/thank emails are from internal data.