The GiveWell Blog

Update on GiveWell’s web traffic / money moved: Q2 2011

In addition to evaluations of other charities, GiveWell publishes substantial evaluation on itself, from the quality of its research to its impact on donations. This year, we have added quarterly updates regarding two key metrics: (a) donations to top charities directly through our website (b) web traffic.

Money moved

By “money moved” we mean donations to our top charities that we can confidently identify as being made on the strength of our recommendation. This update focuses only on “money moved” that comes through GiveWell’s website; we’ll report on all donations due to GiveWell’s research at the end of the year (when the majority of large gifts occur).

While money moved through the website is only a fraction of overall money moved (and is also far greater in December than in other months), we believe this is a meaningful metric for tracking our progress/growth (as opposed to overall influence).

The charts below show dollars donated and the number of donations by month. While there’s evidence of noise — May was an unusually slow month, June an unusually strong one — overall, growth in 2011 has been strong.


We report annually money moved to each of our recommended charities, but we don’t plan on including this information in quarterly reports because (a) there are some donations that have been made but we can’t yet to attribute to an organization; (b) overall we don’t feel these figures are very meaningful or good predictors of what the year-end allocation will be.

Web traffic

The table below shows quarterly web traffic to GiveWell’s website.

Quarter Visitors Y/Y growth
Q1 2009 20,681
Q2 2009 14,974
Q3 2009 18,418
Q4 2009 45,956
Q1 2010 48,027 132%
Q2 2010 33,173 122%
Q3 2010 27,729 51%
Q4 2010 68,870 50%
Q1 2011 89,588 87%
Q2 2011 102,506 209%

The charts below show our web traffic over time, including the latest quarter.