Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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October 17, 2007

Australian Federal Election 2007 Online

Now that the Australian Federal Election date has been announced for November 24, I thought it would be interesting to examine the relationship between some of the major news publications online and their traffic to political party websites. I've created custom categories of websites belonging to News Limited and Fairfax; as well as custom categories of Labor and Liberal party websites.

The two charts below show that both News and Fairfax publications have been sending increasing amounts of traffic to Labor party websites (including Kevin07.com) since January 2007. While this is not direct evidence that either publication supports one party over the other, it could indicate that users are more likely to have been influenced by news stories to investigate labor policies or leaders further. Labor's steady increase in upstream traffic from News Limited websites is of particular interest.

Leveraging our Clickstream Gap Analysis tool, here's another view of the data which shows an analysis of upstream sites for Australian Labor Party and Australian Liberal Party for the week ending 13/10/2007, filtered to only include upstream sites common to both, sorted by magnitude of the difference. A couple points of interest: FederalElection.com.au, a production of iPrime and affiliate of Channel 7, sends 3.37% more traffic to the Liberal Party website than the Labor Party website. ABC Online sends 1.09% more traffic to the Labor Party website than the Liberal Party website. Again, while this does not necessarily indicate bias on media channels, it does highlight where users are influenced to migrate online to party websites where they can be exposed to election policies.

Finally, a quick a nod to Steven Noble, at Hill and Knowlton, who have a pretty funky election prediction application that can also be shared on Facebook.

Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 11:28 AM
Posted to Politics