Galloway's web boast is wide of the mark

18 April 2005
What's the opposite of busy?


Respect Coalition candidate George Galloway made an appearance on the Today programme hours before his party's manifesto launch.

Keen to demonstrate the vibrancy of his party, Mr Galloway told listeners: "We're the fastest growing party in the country. We're the busiest political website in the country."

Busy in internet terms means, of course, the amount of traffic a site receives. This can be measured in a number of ways including by unique users, visits, page impressions or a combination of the three.

In order to verify Mr Galloway's claim, FactCheck asked web monitoring firm Hitwise to source the relevant statistics.

Tracking the traffic

The data provided covered the three main Westminster parties and four smaller parties - Green, UK Independence (UKIP), Respect and Plaid Cymru. SNP traffic is too small to report, Hitwise said.

The figures show that since the launch of the election campaign on 5 April, the Conservative website has consistently grabbed the biggest market share, only ceding ground to the Labour Party once. That was on 13 April, the day Labour launched its manifesto.

The Liberal Democrats, as in the polls, come third.

As for the minor and regional parties, the Green Party website is the most visited, followed by UKIP, with Respect in third and Plaid Cymru in fourth.

Unfortunately for Mr Galloway, far from being the busiest website, www.respectcoalition.org, is one of the least busy sites tracked.

The table below shows market share for the first full week of campaigning:

Party websites by market share

Website	Market Share
Conservative Party	33.70%
Labour Party	28.09%
Liberal Democrat	21.30%
Green Party	7.60%
UKIP	4.53%
Respect Coalition	3.32%
Plaid Cymru	1.45%

source: Hitwise, week ending 16 April 2005

A spokesman for Respect told FactCheck: "We are certainly getting more hits to the site than we've ever had before."

The methodology

Hitwise collects its data from a range of internet service providers (ISPs), covering the user habits of 8.4 million people in the UK.

Market share refers to the amount of traffic a site enjoys within a given category, in this case "Party Political".

Sources
George Galloway interview, BBC Radio 4 Today, 18 April 2005
Hitwise


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