Tracking 2008: Traffic to Candidate Websites as of 11/12/07

Back in September, we started looking at official campaign website traffic ratings for Democratic, Republican, Green and Independent candidates for president. To measure traffic to the presidential candidates’ websites, we rely on rankings from Alexa, a website that collects information on site visits for websites across the internet by users of the Alexa toolbar, then uses a combination of visitors and page views to a website 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 October 20 and measured again on November 12, 2007. The last column on the right shows the three weeks’ change between those two dates (remember, a higher ranking shows up as a lower number rank):

For quick reference, I’ve labeled upward trends with green and downward trends with red. There isn’t a single trend here toward increased visits as the primary elections come closer; rather, there’s variation, with some candidates’ websites getting a lot more attention than others’. Talk about Mike Huckabee’s emergence as a fundamentalist candidate of choice is borne out here, with a lot of people checking out his campaign. Both Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards have also been attracting more attention, although both rank well behind Barack Obama, who is most-visited Democratic candidate on the web. But then there’s Ron Paul. You know, there’s a barrier effect to website rankings; once you’ve gotten up in the rankings it’s very hard to get higher because every other website in that group is highly competitive and, well, there just aren’t that many numbers in ranking left to go. But Ron Paul just keeps doing it, halving his website rank again. I don’t agree with many of the man’s stands, but it’s undeniable that he is coming on strong as a candidate, at least on the Internet.

If the Green Party were going to have any force in this election season, I think we would have seen it by now, since Green supporters in the past have been highly-educated users of the Internet. But the Green Party candidates I’ve been tracking have simply not been attracting attention.

We’ll take a look at these again after another two or three weeks and see whether and how trends change.