Peter Lapshin, Moscow
Translated by Yuri Yudin

This material summarizes some statistical data of the web usage of Cultivar. The information is based upon the data generated by the 'Mail.ru Rating' web counter.

The demand analysis of the upper level sections has shown that the most popular section is Photogallery (50%). The Russian Home Page has a rating of 30%, the English Home Page is 18%, 'Articles' is 13%.

The English language readers use more frequently than the Russian language readers the following sections: 'Articles', 'Links' and 'Subscription', but less frequently use our search engine and almost ignore the information about the authors and the team.

Table 1 has another internal rating – the relative popularity of all materials published in Cultivar issues 1 to 23. This rating is based on frequency of user hits during the entire period of the web counter. These are the most demanding articles of all the issues, which gathered the largest audience (we have shown the first 20 articles).

Table 1.

The data in Table 1 shows that interests of the English language and the Russian language readers rarely intersect. At least in the most popular twenty articles, only three prompted common interest of the two audiences:

• PRELIMINARY LIST OF CRESTED AND MONSTROUS FORMS OF SOME SUCCULENT PLANTS by Alexey V. Naumov, Moscow (#5 and #14)
• LIST OF CRESTED FORMS OF CACTI (#7 and #15)
• PHOTO REPORT FROM CACTI EXHIBITIONS in Chelyabinsk and Petrozavodsk, Russia (#19 and #19)

Table 2 contains geographical data of the Cultivar audience. The table has the list of the countries that read our pages and the frequency of the hits, in %.

Table 2.

The most active usage has been shown by readers from the United States. Russia is on the second place followed by Europe (we are not sure which countries are included in Europe by the web counter). We should mention that the position in this list depends not only on the interest in cacti, but also on the level of Internet development in these countries. For instance, the first position of the USA does not necessarily mean that the Americans have shown the most interest in our publications, but only displayed the highest number of users. At the same time, the second place for Russia is an important number, considering significantly lower availability of the Internet in Russia and the fact that the entire issue is now bilingual which means that the Russian language readers no longer have the advantage in the availability of material.

The total number of countries that are interested in our publication doesn't change significantly in years and is about 78 to 82 countries. At the same time, the number of hits has been continuously growing, which is shown in Table 3 below.

Table 3. Geography of Cultivar web hits for the period of March 2002 to March 2004

Total number of hits:
March 2002		March 2003			March 2004
325		2,173			3,911
Hits by countries:
Algeria – 1 Argentina – 43 Armenia – 1 Australia – 84 Austria – 23 Azerbaijan – 1 Bahrain – 2 Bangladesh – 3 Belarus – 26 Belgium – 38 Bolivia – 1 Brazil – 65 Bulgaria – 16 Canada – 101 Chile – 11 China – 18	Columbia – 3 Costa-Rica – 4 Croatia – 4 Czech Republic – 18 Denmark – 4 Egypt – 11 Estonia – 26 Europe – 407 Finland – 8 France – 30 Georgia - 7 Germany – 156 Great Britain–93 Greece –6 Guatemala – 1 Hong Kong – 14		Hungary – 17 Iceland – 7 India – 9 Indonesia – 8 Iran – 4 Ireland – 11 Israel – 16 Italy – 72 Japan – 36 Jordan – 2 Kazakhstan – 11 Kuwait – 4 Kyrgyzstan – 3 Latvia – 4 Libya – 1 Lithuania – 43	Malaysia – 1 Martinique – 1 Mexico – 52 Mongolia – 1 New Zealand – 4 Norway – 2 Pakistan – 2 Philippines – 2 Poland – 20 Portugal – 3 Russia – 686 Saudi Arabia – 2 Singapore – 4 Slovakia – 18 South America – 56 South Korea – 3		Spain – 61 Sweden – 29 Switzerland – 16 Taiwan – 3 Thailand – 39 The Netherlands – 22 Trinidad and Tobago – 1 Turkey – 14 Ukraine – 108 United Arab Emirates – 1 United States – 1465 Uruguay – 6

Notes: we don't have the definitive answers for the two following questions:

1. Which countries are included in Europe by the web counter?
2. Which criteria are used in monthly, weekly and daily statistical reports? This data is somewhat confusing. In the monthly report it shows 118 hits from 25 countries. In the weekly report from May 3 to May 30, it shows 382 hits from 36 countries. In the daily report – 4093 hits from 76 countries (shown in the table above).