California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's announcement that he may travel to Ohio to campaign for President Bush in the waning days of the presidential election was very good news for the San Francisco Chronicle's website.
That has nothing to do with political leanings, though. SFGate benefited from Schwarzenegger's proposed trip because the story racked up one of the highest pageview counts of recent stories.
SFGate has not been alone in seeing markedly increased traffic in recent weeks. In fact, while experts aren't sure if internet-wide traffic is up as a result of the election, it is certain that a wide range of sites have seen impressive gains in site visitors as a result of the election.
It "goes without saying that the politics category has seen a massive increase," said Graham Mudd, a spokesman for comScore Media Metrix, a leading analyzer of internet traffic behavior. "Politics was by far the largest gaining category compared to last year."
According to Mudd, political websites as a category saw boosts over the last two weeks -- Oct. 3 and Oct. 10 -- of 140 percent over the same period a year ago.
"More than 8.6 million people visited the politics (sites) in the week ending Oct. 10," Mudd explained.
Nielsen/Net Ratings spokeswoman Marla Dierkes said that among those political sites seeing impressive gains recently, none has had the bounce that the official site of the Democratic National Party had during the week of Oct. 10.
That week, Dierkes said, the site's traffic jumped 84.2 percent from the week before, from 868,000 unique visitors to 1.6 million, largely on the strength of a web page titled "Take Action: Stop the Right-wing Smears Against John Kerry."
"The consistent surges in key political sites' traffic demonstrates that candidates continue to leverage the internet to effectively communicate their strategies and defend themselves against issues influencing the presidential election," said Nielsen/NetRatings senior analyst Corey Jeffrey in a statement Friday. "The site increases also show how the internet offers a powerful way for voters to proactively get involved in the election."
But political sites weren't the only winners in this political season, say experts like Mudd and Dierkes, who point out that the spillover from the election applies to several website categories.
Mudd said portals and e-mail services have seen 3 percent to 5 percent increases over a year ago, while general news sites had weeks in late September and early October with around 15 percent traffic growth. That hasn't sustained since then, he allowed, but there still has been clear improvement since.
Many of the new visitors come to news sites on the strength of specific stories.
For example, SFGate's story about Schwarzenegger's plans to visit Ohio bumped up the numbers. And Machs remembered that during the Democratic National Convention, a photo essay Time.com ran using Polaroid pictures by Christopher Morris garnered intense public interest.
"Even with all the photos you could get of the DNC, we got millions and millions of pageviews," Macht said. "That was a happy experiment."
Similarly, Vlae Kershner, editor of SFGate, said stories about California's gubernatorial recall election in October 2003 drew far more visitors than anyone had expected. And many of those coming to SFGate to read about the recall came from other websites.
"The thing is that you can only do so much under your own power, by people going through your homepage," Kershner said. "The rest of it is people linking to you."
But as such sites experience heavier than usual traffic in the final days of the campaign, they are primed to turn some of those new visitors into regulars.
"The way big events work is you keep a certain percentage of the traffic you get," said Kershner. "Other guys say it's 10 percent. But I think it may even be a little higher than that.... The baseline doesn't go back to where it was before.... So you build your traffic around a big event, and you retain some of it."
Josh Macht, editor of Time Online Edition, Time magazine's website, agreed.
"We've certainly seen that in the past," Macht said. "That's what's happened with large news events. There's a spike, then it settles down a little bit higher than it was before."
Meanwhile, news editors like Kershner and Macht find themselves more and more subject to a linking feedback loop between their sites and the blogosphere.
"How many more people right now are following the election from the various bloggers," asked Macht rhetorically. "And those bloggers are feeding off of us. So it's this cycle. They end up with more traffic and (we) end up with more traffic."
As impressed as everyone is by how the election has created larger than usual internet traffic, all the experts seem to agree on one thing: Nov. 2 is still more than a week away, and election day should drive traffic through the roof.
