tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5612670157201289832.post1358197332675964164..comments2023-08-23T06:09:56.304-07:00Comments on Election 2010: The Nice Party Turns Nasty?The School of Politics and International Relations.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06499387045947989393noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5612670157201289832.post-58543922376495211782010-04-29T06:04:24.783-07:002010-04-29T06:04:24.783-07:00The most widely used and industry accepted means o...The most widely used and industry accepted means of analysing website popularity in terms of ranking based on internet traffic, is using the website www.alexa.com<br /><br />It could be viewed as the largest internet based poll, as it simply refers to website hits. Alexa is owned by Amazon and collects "cookies" from millions of websurfers from around the world. <br /><br />It is able to categorise these visitors by country as it recognises the physical location of IP addresses.<br /><br />In my own business, we have been using Alexa for more than 5 years as a means of judging the internet presence of competitors.<br /><br />I have just analysed the rankings of the 5 main political parties in the UK and was completely amazed by the results.<br /><br />Here is the ranking from page 1 for all UK websites http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/GB<br /><br />To be clear, in the UK, www.google.co.uk ranks as number 1, and www.facebook.com ranks as number 2 etc etc. <br /><br />The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1 in each country.<br /><br />The following figures are for each of the political parties (as of today) and reflect the ranking, from UK surfers, based on visitors and pageviews over the last 3 months. <br /><br /><br />1) BNP 761 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bnp.org.uk#<br /><br />2) Lib Dems 807 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/libdems.org.uk#<br /><br />3) Conservatves 896 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/conservatives.com#<br /><br />4) Labour 1066 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/labour.org.uk#<br /><br />5) UKIP 2956 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ukip.org#<br /><br />One might have expected the traffic of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat websites to be broadly similar to each other.<br />Even the UKIP ranking is not particularly surprising. <br /><br />However, the ranking of the BNP website as the most highly trafficked UK party political website is just incredible. <br /><br />None of the pollsters or political journalists in the UK have even started to understand that the BNP is attracting so much interest from British surfers ( in the comfort of their own homes.)<br /><br />It seems very likely to me that there are large numbers of Conservative voters who are so fed-up with the Labour Party's record of unrestrained immigration and all of its effects on UK society, that they want to hear something much more convincing that the Conservative policy to-date. It is clear from the disproportionate interest in the BNP website that the "Political correctness" of the Conservative Party is potentially losing a large number of votes. <br /><br />David Cameron has a huge opportunity in the next 8 days, unbeknown to the other parties, to try to woo and win back to the Conservative Party, this tacit and flirting interest in the BNP from British web-surfers/voters who would have voted Conservative in the past. This obviously has to be done with great sensitivity so as not to alienate voters in the centre of the political spectrum.<br /><br />I believe that this will put a clearer marker in the sand for the Conservative Party and will put the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties on the backfoot and may attract 2-3% more support for the Conservative Party.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com