Determining the 2008 Election Winner Based on Web Traffic – Mitt Romney & Barack Obama?
Can web traffic and data determine the likely outcome of the 2008 election primaries? I put each of the major candidates through Quantcast and the results are quite revealing. The charts below are estimated ‘unique users per month’ and it should be on an apples-to-apples basis because none of these candidates are truly web 2.0 / dorky enough to actually ‘Quantify’ their websites.
If you look at both the aggregate numbers and the traffic growth, the results are pretty phenomenal. Mitt Romney, for instance, has seen significant, rapid growth while Hilary Clinton has the largest aggregate numbers – but her traffic is actually declining.
Ron Paul is famous for his web popularity (just read the front page of Digg at any given moment) – and that translates into larger overall numbers than Romney, but his traffic is steadily growing while Mitt’s is surging.
The biggest surprise is Hilary Clinton – clearly she has the biggest brand name, but to have declining traffic during the primary season is an awful indicator!
Mitt Romney
Ron Paul
John McCain
Hilary Clinton
Barack Obama
Ron Paul tops 500,000 – more than all the rest, even Obama. Type “endorses x” where x is all the candidates in google and you will see that Ron Paul has over 100,000 endorsements including Christopher Walken, Penn Jillette, Bill Maher, Howard Stern, and Barry Goldwater Jr.
Paul has the largest aggregate numbers. If these graphs were not distorted it would be easy to see Paul’s trajectory upwards is at least the same as Romney. Romney’s volume is in intervals of 200,000. Ron Paul on the other hand has his volume expressed in intervals of 500,000. Hmm. I wonder why Romney’s curve “appears” dramatic.
President Paul has over 100,000 endorsements.
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your graphs are distorted, in case you were unaware
Note – the graphs are indeed ‘distorted’ but the initial post took everything into consideration. The point of the article was to weigh aggregate numbers against acceleration / trends. That is why Romney’s traffic surge is impressive… Ron Paul has great numbers but growth rates aren’t spectacular.
Go to ronpaulgraphs for several spectacular examples of exponential growth curves.
Agree completely – Ron Paul’s following is explosive and highly internet based. But the original point remains: his official website has not seen the same growth rates and acceleration as some of the others.
Let’s see your numbers. I notice most the other campaigns don’t give real-time stats out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE1ClePGyUU
Did you watch?
Romney’s curve looks to have topped out.
He went from 100K to 300K in six months.
Paul went from less than 100 to over 500 in the same period.
Mccain’s slope is impressive – at the end of the year, but his six month gain was only 100K. At that scale the ups and downs look more pronounced.
Hillary’s downturn is interesting, what do you think caused it? It does seem to correspond to Obama’s upswing.
Obama’s growth curves are exciting. He should publish real-time data on his site. The drama helps draw people in. I can’t tell you how excited we all were to watch Dr. Paul raise over $6 million in one day.
[...] Web Audience Metrics to Predict Election Posted January 24, 2008 Check out Ryan’s Spoon post using quantcast figures for the campaign websites to project election [...]
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Ron_Paul_Has_100_000_Endorsements
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advertising publicity…
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Ryan, I agree with gogi. The numbers are not visible and only the names are visible. It would be greatly appreciated if you'll check it out.
Interesting case study. This could be used for a variety of polls as well. Nice!
thanks
ablegate…
My entire web site is 100% data-driven. If I lock the tables, it will bring the entire web site down for a while. The Googlebots are hitting my web site every 30 to 90 seconds. If the site is down when the Googlebot comes and the bot sees that the site…