§ The Earl of Northeskasked Her Majesty's Government:
How many hits are being received per week by (a) the Prime Minister's webcasts and (b) the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman's pages on the 10 Downing Street website. [HL1766]
§ Lord Falconer of ThorotonThe Prime Minister's weekly audio broadcasts on the Internet appear on the site in three forms—"Real" stream, "mp3" file (the broadcast-quality file) and the transcript. The Real streams are hosted on a separate server and it is therefore possible to say that they have been accessed by on average 3,473 people each week.
However, many thousands more will have accessed the transcripts of the broadcasts and the mp3 version. These are hosted on the Number 10 site and the site's statistics software is not configured to give figures for the number of people accessing specific parts of the site such as these. As a consequence, we are unable to give an exact figure for the total number of people accessing the Prime Minister's weekly broadcasts. The average number of hits per week on pages in the site has been 3.3 million.
96WAFor the same reason, we do not know how many people have accessed the briefings by the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman.
It would be possible to configure our statistics software to record figures for hits to each page on the site. However, this would place a heavy burden on our server, which would slow down access to the site for the public and lead to a poorer service. For this reason, we do not propose to record these specific figures.
§ The Earl of Northeskasked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they are satisfied with the level of public response to the Prime Minister's webcasts on the 10 Downing Street website. [HL1767]