April 2015 was the highest traffic month for Open Borders: The Case, even though we had a much smaller number of new posts than usual, and we did not have any special events such as the Open Borders Day we had last month.

Social media successes

The following pages and posts published this month did best on social media:

• Our Wedding and Immigration Disaster by Justin Merrill, April 6, 2015, got 151 Facebook engagements and 27 Twitter engagements. It got a lot of traffic from a MetaFilter thread mentioning the post. We spent $10 on Facebook promotion of the post.
• Open Borders and the Hive Mind Hypothesis by Nathan Smith, April 27, 2015, got 27 Facebook engagements and 6 Twitter engagements.

In addition, an earlier post by John Lee, Literally refusing to rescue drowning people: your taxpayer funds at work, putting immigrants to death, January 9, 2015, was promoted on Facebook and posted on Twitter in light of heightened interest in the subject of migrants dying at sea in the wake of the April 2015 Mediterranean Sea migrant shipwrecks. The post now stands at 267 Facebook engagements and 26 Twitter engagements. It also led to Jasmine Coleman, a journalist at the BBC, contacting John Lee for comments on the issue that were published in this article.

Our total Facebook spend for the month was $20: $10 on Merrill’s post and $10 on Lee’s old post.

Search interest

Users who come via search (which constitutes about 60% of our traffic) generally go to the site’s background pages rather than blog posts, but there are some blog posts that get a decent amount of search traffic. These have remained fairly constant since January, albeit with a few changes. Data below is from Google Analytics, using the integration with Google Webmaster Tools.

• In the wake of the 2015 Nepal earthquake (that hit the region on Saturday, April 25, 2015), there was a substantial increase in search-driven traffic to Vipul Naik’s blog post Nepal and India: an open borders case study, published March 21, 2014. However, this traffic seemed driven largely by people looking for material on Nepal rather than people specifically interested in open borders, and its engagement with our site was minimal. We therefore did not promote the post on social media. The page was shown in 75,000 Google Search queries and was clicked about 2,500 times (a 3.33% CTR).
• The blog post Bangladesh and India: move towards open borders by Vipul Naik, January 15, 2015, was shown in 40,000 search queries and got 1,600 clicks (a 4% CTR). The search interest was sustained rather than based on any topical events.
• The blog post Immigration and the US Constitution by Ilya Somin, March 18, 2013, was shown in 6,500 search queries and was clicked 400 times (a 6.15% CTR). The search interest was sustained rather than based on any topical events.

Open Borders Action Group highlights

The Open Borders Action Group, a Facebook discussion group created for more free-flowing discussion of issues related to migration, has continued to grow in size and remains active. Some of the top posts there for the month are listed below:

• Bleg post by Bryan Caplan, April 27, regarding the economic effects of low-skilled immigration, as requested by a friend who is a Persian Gulf economist. 4 likes, 10 comments.
• Post by Vipul Naik, April 21, linking to ‘Send them back’: Hillary says wave of illegal immigrant children should be ‘reunited with their families’, June 17, 2014. 1 like, 12 comments.
• Post by Nathan Smith, April 3, with an updated and near-final draft of his paper on the global economic impact of open borders. 5 likes, 39 comments.

Site traffic: details

Pageviews for Open Border: The Case:

Here is the WordPress traffic by day for the past few weeks:

Here is a Google Analytics screenshot for the month:

Other membership and engagement numbers

• The site’s Facebook page reached 4476 likes at the end of April, compared to 4399 at the end of March.
• The site’s Twitter account reached 1203 followers.
• The Open Borders Action Group reached 1031 members.