With nearly 2.6 million unique visits to its website in 2012, START (start.umd.edu) has become a critical website for terrorism research in the scholarly and government communities, increasing the number of visitors to its site by more than 27 percent since 2011 and 240 percent since 2009. It's not just traffic to the site that has increased, but traffic within the site, which has increased by more than 50 percent since last year, with 24.6 million page views in 2012. More than 17 million of those page views were among START's Global Terrorism Database (GTD), which has served as a resource for more than 3.25 million visitors in the past three years.
Government usage of START's site and the GTD has increased 579 percent since 2009, and the number of government entities using them has more than doubled to 825 government agencies, offices and departments. A record-breaking number of educational institutions and influential organizations are using start.umd.edu. Now, more than 1,500 universities, colleges and K-12 schools, and more than 1,375 nonprofits, think tanks and advocacy groups are using start.umd.edu and the GTD.