User:Andrew Gray/Election statistics

I thought people would be interested to read some statistics on various pageviews during the US election campaign. Because we use UTC for the statistics, the "election day" figures can't really be determined, but we can average the two relevant days to get an idea of what peak traffic looked like. I've given two sets of stats for each one - the daily average during the month of October to gauge underlying interest, and the two-day average on the 4th/5th to show the peak. For articles directly related to Obama, I've also given figures for the 4th November only; this cuts out some of the US election day traffic, but does mean we don't get skewed by the "post-victory surge" of people going to find out who this new guy is. As usual, all statistics are taken from stats.grok.se.

Main articles

First off, let's look at the main articles, not including redirects.

Barack Obama averaged 102,000 hits/day in October, whilst John McCain averaged 65,000. On the 4th and 5th of November, McCain averaged 331,000 hits/day whilst Obama averaged 1,460,000. If we just look at the 4th, it's 339,000 versus 621,000. On the 5th, Obama's pageviews rocketed, totalling 2.3 *million* - a third of the hits we got to the front page that day. (There doesn't seem to have been a significant spike in "normal browser" traffic that day, mind, as gauged by the front page)

Sarah Palin averaged 86,000 hits/day in October and 180,000 for the 4th/5th. Joe Biden averaged almost exactly the same for the 4th/5th, though he had the "victory surge", and as a result his pageviews on the 4th were a mere 77,000; his overall average for October was 42,000 hits/day. The VP debates are an interesting sidenote; the traffic to Palin increased 3.5x, whilst the traffic to Biden shot up *ten* times.

Note that, yes, Palin got more traffic than McCain. By a fairly solid margin, too.

The page on the election itself, meanwhile, averaged 27,000 hits/day in October, and 249,000 hits/day on the 4th and 5th of November.

Relative pageviews of Obama and McCain

This graph shows the percentage spread of the pageviews for any given day - if the line is above the centre, Obama had more traffic, and if below, McCain had more traffic. The percentages represent the total difference between them, so 20% would mean a 60:40 ratio. Timeframe covered is 1st August to 31st October, and it shows a three-day moving average to smooth out daily fluctuations. The blank spot in late October is due to a gap in the data.

It starts off in Obama's favour, at the start of August, but is steadily dropping. It bottoms out in late August, slightly in McCain's favour, and then has a surge for the Democratic Convention. This is followed by a fairly equal surge for the Republican Convention, and when the dust settles in early September they're about equal. The line then begins slowly trending towards Obama, drops back to equal in late September (with McCain getting attention because of his reaction to the financial crisis?), and then takes off at a steady clip back towards Obama. I can't be completely sure, but at a glance it looks like days with Presidential debates mean the level of attention paid to them both is closer than usual.

Conclusion? You get lots of eyeballs during your convention, but overall, our readers wanted to know about Obama more.

Redirects

The above figures for John McCain and Barack Obama don't include redirection pages. When we include all ninety-odd pages that redirect to Obama, and the twenty-five or so that redirect to McCain, the numbers change - Obama goes to 127,000/day in October, 728,488 on the 4th, and 2,659,384 on the 5th; McCain goes to 74,000/day in October, 364,729 on the 4th, and 370,890 on the 5th. The most prominent redirect for each is their surname (13% of October traffic for Obama, 6.5% for McCain), followed by a couple of common misspellings and then a long tail.

In total, 20% of Obama's traffic during October came from redirects, with them making up 15% of the traffic on the 4th and 13.5% of the traffic on the 5th. McCain's had a different pattern - they made up 11.5% of traffic in October, 7% on the 4th, and 13% on the 5th. It's not clear why traffic to the redirects picked up for him whilst the traffic to the main article didn't. Generally speaking, the decline in traffic through the redirect pages on the 4th must be partly a result of the direct link on the front page?

Daughter articles

The figures above are pretty remarkable numbers - tens of thousands a day! The figures for the daughter articles are less remarkable in their magnitude, but they're still pretty good. I've picked three fairly standard topics for daughter articles, which they all had with one exception. I'd have liked to compare the articles on their personal lives or past careers, but there wasn't a clear one-to-one matchup.

Election campaigns

Main articles: Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008 and John McCain presidential campaign, 2008

Both main candidates had an article on their election campaign. The article on the Obama election campaign averaged 2,800 hits/day in October and 24,700 hits/day on the 4th/5th; for the 4th only, it was 11,800. The McCain campaign article was 2,200 hits/day in October and 7,400 hits/day on the 4th/5th.

Political positions

Main articles: Political positions of Barack Obama; Political positions of John McCain; Political positions of Joe Biden; Political positions of Sarah Palin; and Comparison of United States presidential candidates, 2008

All four had a "political positions" article, of varying degrees of quality. Obama's article got a neat 6,000 hits/day in October and 32,500 hits/day on the 4th/5th; for the 4th only, it was 20,600. The equivalent article for McCain got 2,600 hits/day in October and 12,100 hits/day on the 4th/5th. People cared much less about the VPs; "Political positions of Sarah Palin" had 1,300 hits/day in October and 2,300 hits/day on the 4th/5th, whilst the one for Biden took a mere 725 hits/day in October and 2,000 on the 4th/5th; for the 4th only, it was 1,400. The article comparing the candidates' positions averaged 2,700 hits/day in October, and 10,700 hits/day on the 4th/5th.

Interestingly, on the day of the VP debates, traffic to the articles on their positions increased 4.5x for Biden and 2.5x for Palin; a reversal of the usual situation, where Palin was more popular.

In popular culture

Main articles: Public image of Barack Obama, Cultural and political image of John McCain, and Public image and reception of Sarah Palin

Okay, okay, they call it "public image", but we know what that means...

The article on Obama's public image took 800 hits/day in October and 8,000 hits/day on the 4th/5th; on the 4th only, it was 4,500. For McCain, it was 300 hits/day in October and 1,100 on the 4th/5th; for Palin, it was 1,600 hits/day in October and then 2,700 on the 4th/5th. (Joe Biden apparently has no public perception worth writing about - I make no comment.)

Conclusions

It's clear that Obama was generally the most popular subject, followed by Palin, then McCain, and then Biden. For the main articles, in October, Palin had 84% of Obama's traffic, McCain had 63%, and Biden had 41%. Looking in the daughter articles, though, it changes; McCain was more popular than Palin with regards to their political positions, but when looking at their public image, Palin had double Obama's traffic...

It also seems that readers' interest in detailed discussion varies heavily by topic and by person. We can get some idea of this by looking at the pageview of the daughter articles as a function of the traffic to the main articles. For political positions, Obama had a 1:17 ratio in October - the highest I found - which meant that something like 6% of the people reading his article clicked through. McCain had a similarly high rate (1:25), dropping to 1:58 for Biden and 1:66 for Palin. For the public image, this was a lot more erratic - Obama at 1:128, McCain at 1:216, and Palin on a surprisingly high 1:54.

If we put those figures together, it suggests that our readers were about seven times more interested in Obama's policies than his public image, and about nine times more interested in McCain's policies than his public image... but they were evenly divided on Palin. Interesting.

When we aggregate in the redirects, we find a few things. Firstly, Obama's relative lead over McCain increases by a couple of percentage points both in October and on November 4th. Secondly, a quarter of redirects - and so five percent of all our readers - seem to have trouble spelling "Barack" (or, to a lesser extent, "Obama").

On November 4th, the two candidate articles got a million hits when front-page articles, an increase of several hundred thousand - normally, front-page FAs get 50-100k extra hits. These must easily be the most popular FAs we've run in a long time.