Popi Bama
Jan 24th, 2007 | 4 responses
It seems that Barack Obama’s website is quite popular, to say the least:
Twelve percent of Internet surfers who visit www.senate.gov click to the freshman senator’s homepage, according to rankings on Alexa.com, which tracks website traffic. Obama’s site gets more hits than any other senator’s, and, much like his popularity, those hits have increased over the last month.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who made her official presidential announcement last Saturday, pulls 7 percent of Internet surfers to her site from the main Senate page. Her numbers rose to current levels Monday after stagnating at 4 percent for the last month.
[...]
Over the last week, Obama’s campaign site has been visited more often than Clinton’s. His site has an average ranking of 86,653 over the last three months, while Clinton’s three-month average is much lower, at 291,730.
And the Republicans?
Likely GOP presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is tied with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), pulling only 2 percent of senate.gov users to his site. The percentage of users he gets has also fallen over the last month.
McCain’s three-month ranking is [...] at an average of 321,363.
Popi Bama, indeed.
There is a lot of hype surrounding Obama right now, so it is quite understandable that his website attracts a lot of visitors. Another explanation:
“I imagine that Obama might be at the top because while all four of them are mentioned as possible presidential candidates, the others are known by the public much better for various reasons,� said Andrew Busch, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College. “You would expect [Obama] to have the most traffic because he’s the one with the least amount of information on him.�
That is actually how I, for this moment at least, would explain it as well. He is the lesser known candidate, a media hype has been created, it is completely logical that many, many people visit his blog on a daily basis as to find out more about him / his views.
opinions powered by SendLove.to
4 Responses to “Popi Bama”
Another reason Obama might get more views. In the liberal blogosphere he has far more support than Hillary. People already paying attention to the ’08 elections are hard-core political junkies, and despite the little moderate universe we’ve created for ourselves, I’m betting a majority of political junkies are also partisans. Also internet users skew young. I’m betting younger people feel more sympathetic towards Obama than Hillary.
As for the republicans getting so few hits, I dunno. One would have to look at how internet usage breaks down according to political tendencies. I’ve always had the impression that the liberal internet world was larger and better organized than the conservative one, which could account for some of it.
“In the liberal blogosphere he has far more support than Hillary.”
Indeed, indeed. But we ought to be careful: Neticen aren’t the only voters. It would be bad if we our reality-based view would be distorted by doing too much navel-gazing…
Very true, Gray. That’s why political speculation, while fun for politinerds like us, isn’t very useful this early in the game. The reality is that MOST voters are blissfully unaware of the fact that the ’08 elections are already here. The view from the standpoint of someone who only watches the nightly news, if that, is very different from our own, be they on the left or right. The fact that more liberal bloggers like Hillary, or that more conservative ones like Romney (or was it Giulliani? I forget) doesn’t mean the public at large does.
Very true Lynx. I always think to myself that those who are very politically active, don’t seem to realize that they are the exception on the general rule.
The general rule?
Talk about politics now and then, but only to complain. Don’t think too much about it all.