Labour trapped by the web

21 April 2005
FactCheck gets Carter




Earlier this week, FactCheck put Respect candidate George Galloway's claim that his party had the "busiest website" to the test. A day later, in an email to party supporters, Labour's General Secretary Matt Carter made a similar boast.

"It was really great to hear that Labour's website is now the most popular political site in the UK," he wrote.

Like Mr Galloway before him, Mr Carter is wide of the mark.

When FactCheck asked the Labour Party for the source of the claim, a spokesman pointed towards an article that appeared on Netimperative, the digital media news website. As "supporting evidence" he cited Alexa.com, which measures web traffic.

Neither appears to offer convincing support for Labour's position.

Lucky 13

The Netimperative article dated 15 April was titled: "Manifesto pushes Labour's popularity online".

The story read: "Data from web monitoring firm Hitwise shows that on Wednesday 13 April, the same day Labour released its election manifesto, www.labour.org.uk jumped from number 5 to number 1 in the space of 24 hours."

This indeed was the case. Unfortunately for Labour, 24 hours later its site was off the top spot. And as FactCheck's previous analysis showed (using the same web monitoring firm quoted in the Netimperative story), Labour has ceded top spot to the Conservatives throughout the campaign with the exception of that single day.

So, to the supporting evidence. Alexa.com measures the browsing habits of 10 million web users around the world. It tracks site traffic - a combination of unique users and page views - on three-month cycles.

Go to the site, type in the address of a site you want to measure and it will give a ranking against all other available websites. The lower the ranking, the higher the traffic.

Using this tool, FactCheck entered the web addresses for the three main Westminster parties.

Web performance of main parties

Website	Ranking	Market Share
Conservative Party	46,684	33.70%
Labour Party	56,565	28.09%
Liberal Democrats	66,668	21.30%

sources: Alexa.com, Hitwise, April 2005

The results? Conservatives.com was ranked 46,684, labour.org.uk ranked 56,565 and libdems.org.uk ranked 66,668. None of the sites threaten to topple Yahoo!, MSN and Google - ranked one, two and three respectively - from the top.

But, as with the Hitwise measure, the Conservatives lead Labour.

Sources
Manifesto pushes Labour's popularity online, Netimperative, 15 April 2005
Alexa.com