Since Sao Paulo back in December 2006, ICANN has had a dedicated meeting website for each international public meeting.

This website is the main hub for information about the meeting - schedule, venue, videos, help, FAQs, visa information and so on. It is also the site through which we run all our remote participation.

Since the Los Angeles meeting in October 2007, we have had a stats engine running on the sites so we can learn a little about the websites' usage - who is visiting, when and what.

We thought we'd share some of that information with you in case you're interested. And first up is a pure number of visits graph, broken down to the week before and the week of the meeting itself (we actually get alot of visitors up to three months before a meeting, and many after as we archive the sites for future reference).

Website visits over time

Of course what we would be hoping for is a gradual increase in usage over time (the x-axis follow meetings over time, with Mexico City the most recent).

Not so. Delhi is down and Paris is way up. Why? Well, that's hard to be sure about. The reason why Paris is much higher is because the Paris meeting was by far the biggest meeting ICANN has ever run - more people, means more clicks. Plus there was huge press interest in the Paris meeting because the Board approved the new gTLD process, so that contributed - lots of visitors following media links.

Sadly we lost Sunday. Monday and Tuesday stats for Cairo so I have averaged and estimated the likely use of the site for that days and stick it in.

But why the drop for Delhi? Well Delhi was a relatively poorly attended meeting, plus Los Angeles was heavily attended (ICANN meetings are still dominated by US citizens). And, frankly, the Los Angeles meeting site was clearer and easier to use.

So what *can* we learn from this? Well, a gradual increase in usage of the meeting site. But I may have to transpose usage with attendance at meetings to see if there is pattern. My personal feeling is that we need to improve meeting sites - make them clearer and more user-friendly. If we find time to do a big revamp (the meeting sites have followed the same basic design since Delhi) it would be interesting to see what impact that had on usage.

Anyway, there are more stats coming, including where people came from in the world looking at the site and what the most popular pages were.

More of that later.