Last month, we started looking at official campaign website traffic ratings for Democratic, Republican, Green and Independent candidates for president. Now that a some time has passed, let’s move beyond one point in time and see how things have changed.
To measure traffic to the presidential candidates’ websites, we rely on Alexa rankings. Alexa collects information on site visits for websites across the internet. 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 21 and measured again on this morning of October 9, 2007. The last column on the right shows the change between those two dates (remember, a higher ranking shows up as a lower number rank):
| 9/21/2007 | 10/9/2007 | Change | |
| Democrats | |||
| Joseph Biden: | 311,164 | 205,128 | (up 106,036 in rank) |
| Hillary Clinton: | 30,504 | 34,068 | (down 3,564 in rank) |
| Christopher Dodd: | 323,035 | 283,534 | (up 39,501 in rank) |
| John Edwards: | 67,665 | 66,675 | (up 990 in rank) |
| Mike Gravel: | 331,151 | 198,295 | (up 132,856 in rank) |
| Dennis Kucinich: | 85,129 | 115,620 | (down 30,491 in rank) |
| Barack Obama: | 22,269 | 22,126 | (up 143 in rank) |
| Bill Richardson: | 295,461 | 240,954 | (up 54,507 in rank) |
| Independents | |||
| Orion Karl Daley: | 6,536,725 | 6,417,166 | (up 119,559 in rank) |
| Kelcey Wilson: | no visits by alexa users | 4,059,989 | (up to measurable levels in rank) |
| Greens | |||
| Jared Ball: | 912,795 | 4,054,526 | (down 3,141,731 in rank) |
| Jerry Kann: | no visits by alexa users | (no change in rank) | |
| Kent Mesplay: | no visits by alexa users | (no change in rank) | |
| Joe Schriner: | 6,242,460 | 4,444,815 | (up 1,797,645 in rank) |
| kat swift: | 6,323,388 | 9,081,161 | (down 2,757,773 in rank) |
| Republicans | |||
| Sam Brownback: | 601,512 | 365,213 | (up 236,299 in rank) |
| Rudolph Giuliani: | 82,705 | 126,455 | (down 43,750 in rank) |
| Mike Huckabee: | 142,961 | 171,185 | (down 28,224 in rank) |
| Duncan Hunter: | 435,206 | 402,701 | (up 32,505 in rank) |
| Alan Keyes: | 169,744 | 653,900 | (down 484,156 in rank) |
| John McCain: | 190,479 | 152,012 | (up 38,467 in rank) |
| Ron Paul: | 19,988 | 19,019 | (up 969 in rank) |
| Mitt Romney: | 82,221 | 82,405 | (down 184 in rank) |
| Tom Tancredo: | 445,831 | 433,828 | (up 12,003 in rank) |
| Fred Thompson: | 55,856 | 101,435 | (down 45,579 in rank) |
For quick reference, green is trending up and red is trending down. There’s some relative stability — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards and Ron Paul are about where they were before — but there are some large relative changes, too. Alan Keyes and Fred Thompson haven’t translated their announcements of candidacy into sustained attention, and their website visits have fallen by relatively large amounts.
We’ll take a look at these again after another week or two and see whether and how trends change.
