campaign website traffic

According to Alexa (a subsidiary of Amazon and thus at least somewhat legit), here's a breakdown of the "reach" (expressed as the number of users per million internet users) over the last week of the Democratic presidential candidates' websites:

Wesley Clark: 130

Howard Dean: 280

John Edwards: 45

Dick Gephardt: 40

John Kerry: 41.5

Dennis Kucinich: 65

Joe Lieberman: 20

Carol Moseley Braun: 10.5

Al Sharpton: 5

What's striking (besides Sharpton's incredibly low number. I can't help but think it's some sort of glitch) is that the website of Dennis Kucinich, typically the cellar dweller in polls, has a greater reach than all other candidates besides Dean (whose dominance is to be expected) and Clark. Even more surprising is that Kucinich has the highest number of page views per visitor (again, based on the latest one-week average) at 11.9. John Edwards is second at 10.4, and Gephardt is a distant third at 4.1. Howard Dean, incidentally, has the fifth highest number of page views per visitor, 3.5.

Without further examination, these numbers could mean lots of things. It might be that Kucinich's and Edward's websites require more clicking around to obtain content. A far more useful statistic would be the length of visits to each website, but Alexa unfortunately doesn't provide that. As a preliminary conclusion, though, is that Dennis Kucinich has a real internet presence, quite possibly more of one than most of the other candidates. That presence doesn't translate into electoral success, of course, but it does indicate that people have a real interest in Kucinich. Whether that interest would ever turn into a commitment to vote for him in a primary is still unclear.