Another milestone for CIATalk

A year and a half ago, on 1st July 2011, I published a Post entitled “No evil lasts a hundred years…” to paraphrase the well-known proverb. That day CIATalk reached 100,000 impressions. Nearly 18 months later, this week, the CIAT Blog has exceeded 500,000 impressions.

The number of visitors other than the Blog went from 7,765 to 14,563 while the number of different countries that visited us increased from 72 to 84. Excluding Panama, where the headquarters of the Executive Secretariat is located, Peru continued to be the country that contributed most, followed by Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador and Brazil. This time there are several countries from where there was only one visitor. From various parts of the world, in the Caribbean, St. Kitts and Nevis or Dominica; in Europe, Luxembourg and Albania; in Africa, Nigeria or Zimbabwe; in Asia, Nepal or Kazakhstan.

Our most frequent visitors, approximately five hundred today use mobile platforms, primarily iOS, but Android devices are gaining space.

A high percentage of visitors directly access the Blog, probably through the links we send in news alerts and in the CIAT bulletin. Even, perhaps, someone by the recommendation of a colleague who suggests to another colleague to read an article. But Internet search engines are certainly responsible for keep on reading a post, even months after published: Google is, by far, who sends us more readers; followed by Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and Babylon. A lesson learned is that keywords matter in titles, and in the titles, for search engines, are very important. Therefore, posts like “tax, rate or price?”, “Effectiveness and efficiency” or “Tax consequences of globalization” are recurrently searched by search engines.

Links from other sources have grown significantly, and this is a novelty that we introduced with posts with links to social networks: Facebook alone sends over 6700 visits. Followed in order of importance by Twitter, LinkedIn and more far, Diigo, WordPress and Google +. One of my posts “Something boring and yet”, had the highest number of visits/views in this area. In addition to social networks, are the other sites that have placed links to our Blog and sent us readers, such as GS1 of Brazil, the IEF of Spain, the ITD website(1) , the IBFD, ECLAC, Econoticias, or the IEFPA of Argentina among many others with less visits. The websites of the tax administrations of the member countries also send us readers: first the SENIAT in Venezuela, followed by DIAN, in Colombia, the SII in Chile was third and Peru’s SUNAT was fourth.

For those curious about technology: Internet Explorer was responsible for 42.5% of visits, followed by Chrome with 28.3, Firefox with 22.4% and Safari with 6.4%. Other browsers have a residual presence, but I cannot fail to mention any PlayStation. In this segment a major change of trend is noticeable, continuous IE being the largest but lost more than ten percentage points over these eighteen months, while Chrome went from third to second. In terms of operating systems, Windows continues to prevail, but declined 5 points finishing at 83%, Mac is second with 14% and the iPad is third with 1.5%.

But not all the news is good, if during the first nine months we published 41 posts, in the following 18 only 47 were publish in total, including this. There were new collaborators such as Jorge Cosulich, María Goenaga, Fernando Herrero, Vinicius Pimentel, Paulo Ogleari and André Dumoulin; and new issues ranging from the tax information exchange to tax policy sociology.

Keeping the Blog is not easy, but we are determined to do so. When talking to Marcio, our Executive Secretary, over two years ago about creating the Blog, we thought about it as a space for the dynamic exchange of opinions about articles, and many of the officials of the administrations would write many comments and some articles. The truth, this avalanche of comments never arrived, and today we think that it will never come. But, at the same time, we know that the interest in reading is high. An article reaches 800 or 1000 readings in the first week of publication. This number does not compete with the list of subscribers to the New York Times, it is true, but our readers are users of a community, concentrated mainly in the Americas, with a common interest, and in some cases even passionate? That is the CIAT community.

Cheers and Godspeed

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