Last week, we started looking at official campaign website traffic ratings for Democratic, Republican, Green and Independent candidates for president. Now that a week’s passed, let’s move beyond one point in time and see how things have changed.
To measure traffic to the presidential candidates’ websites, we’ll rely on Alexa rankings. Alexa is the website that decided way back to offer an internet archive. That’s proven a bit tricky for the company to maintain, but they continue to collect information on site visits for websites across the ‘net. Alexa uses a combination of visitors and page views to a website (from users of the Alexa toolbar) to calculate a page rank. The most visited site in the whole internet would have a rank of 1, and the least visited website — well, that would get a big fat blank. Bottom line: the lower the page rank, the more visits and visitors a web page has been getting lately.
The following are the Alexa page ranks of Democratic, Green, Independent and Republican presidential candidates measured on September 14 and measured again on September 21. The last column on the right shows the change over the past week (remember, a higher ranking shows up as a lower number rank):
| 9/14/2007 | 9/21/2007 | Change | |
| Democrats | |||
| Joseph Biden: | 222,965 | 311,164 | (down 88,199 in rank) |
| Hillary Clinton: | 44,328 | 30,504 | (up 13,824 in rank) |
| Christopher Dodd: | 293,475 | 323,035 | (down 29,560 in rank) |
| John Edwards: | 66,688 | 67,665 | (down 977 in rank) |
| Mike Gravel: | 169,985 | 331,151 | (down 161,166 in rank) |
| Dennis Kucinich: | 240,300 | 85,129 | (up 155,171 in rank) |
| Barack Obama: | 22,551 | 22,269 | (up 282 in rank) |
| Bill Richardson: | 237,610 | 295,461 | (down 57,851 in rank) |
| Independents | |||
| Orion Karl Daley: | 6,621,929 | 6,536,725 | (up 85,204 in rank) |
| Kelcey Wilson: | no visits by alexa users | no visits by alexa users | (no change in rank) |
| Greens | |||
| Jared Ball: | 7,254,770 | 912,795 | (up 6,341,975 in rank) |
| Jerry Kann: | no visits by alexa users | no visits by alexa users | (no change in rank) |
| Kent Mesplay: | no visits by alexa users | (no change in rank) | |
| Joe Schriner: | 6,258,456 | 6,242,460 | (up 15,996 in rank) |
| kat swift: | 6,353,556 | 6,323,388 | (up 30,168 in rank) |
| Republicans | |||
| Sam Brownback: | 328,365 | 601,512 | (down 273,147 in rank) |
| Rudolph Giuliani: | 124,228 | 82,705 | (up 41,523 in rank) |
| Mike Huckabee: | 219,294 | 142,961 | (up 76,333 in rank) |
| Duncan Hunter: | 397,286 | 435,206 | (down 37,920 in rank) |
| Alan Keyes: | 941,563 | 169,744 | (up 771,819 in rank) |
| John McCain: | 144,333 | 190,479 | (down 46,146 in rank) |
| Ron Paul: | 20,222 | 19,988 | (up 234 in rank) |
| Mitt Romney: | 74,959 | 82,221 | (down 7,262 in rank) |
| Tom Tancredo: | 410,933 | 445,831 | (down 34,898 in rank) |
| Fred Thompson: | 139,887 | 55,856 | (up 84,031 in rank) |
What do these patterns tell you?
We’ll take a look at these again after a week’s time and see whether and how trends change.
The surge of Alan Keyes is easy to understand, with his sudden announcement, and his very entertaining absurdity. What’s new with Dennis Kucinich, though? I don’t understand that.
That’s possibly a tech anomaly — Kucinich recently shifted his website. My suspicion is that last week’s ranking was due to the newness of the new website, and that next week we’ll see something like this week’s, indicating that Dennis Kucinich is relatively popular online.
After last week’s article on this ranking system, I installed the Alexa toolbar and visited my sight several times. I wonder what I’m doing wrong.
It may take a few days to register — you’ve got an Alexa rank now, and that will show in next week’s rankings.
Kelcey, I have to say that I have given your site a cursory glance and, while I agree with many of your ideals, I think your website looks very amateur.
(For the record, since we’re on the subject, I also think a lot of your priorities are messed up — universal access to broadband internet ahead of universal health care? um. but that’s another conversation)