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Road Pricing Petition Website Attracts Silver Surfers from Southern England
February 20, 2007
The government's petitions website has become very popular in the past couple of weeks. Since the road pricing petition was posted, the site has climbed to take the #1 spot among Government websites, overtaking the Met Office and Transport for London. The site ranked #66 among all websites last week based on share of UK internet visits. News reports are filled with stories of protests and the record number of signatories, so this will come as no surprise. What we found really interesting is who is going online to sign the petition.
Readers of the Daily Mail are among those visiting the petitions website. Last week, the e-Petitions website was the top website visited after www.dailymail.co.uk last week. The Daily Mail was the fourth largest provider of traffic to the e-Petitions website behind Google UK, MSN Hotmail and the No. 10 Downing Street website.
Demographic data reveals that road pricing activists are silver surfers from the south of England. Almost half of visitors to the E-Petitions website (47%) in the past four weeks were aged 55+, and this group is 128% more likely to be on the e-Petitions website than average. Most visits in the past four weeks came from southern England, with 46% of visits coming from South-West England, South-East England and Greater London.
Post Script 1 of 2: More Data - Rankings and Category Shifts
Tobias, you asked for data - and well, have I got data for you! The following chart shows the market share of UK internet visits to the top 10 Government websites last week, among all categories of websites. We started tracking visits to the ePetitions website in November and the site has climbed rapidly since. The second chart below shows the rank of the top 10 Government websites, so you can see how things have shifted for these ten sites since the ePetitions website launched. The third chart below shows the ranking of the same sites, exclusing ePetitions, to spread things out a bit.
If anyone (Tobias included) wants more detail or wants this info presented a different way, just let me know!
Post Script 2 of 2: Swing Against Daily Mail
In response to Kevin's question, I have included a graphic below that shows the demographic swing comparing the share of visits to the the ePetitions website and DailyMail.co.uk. Visitors to DailyMail.co.uk skew to 55+, with 31.42$ of visits to the website coming from those 55+ in the past four weeks. This age group is 53% over-represented versus the online population on the site.
Daily Mail's website traffic also comes mainly from the South - in particular London. 22% of visits to the site came from London in the past four weeks. Wales, South West, South East and London were all over-indexed on the site versus average.
As you can see from the image below, whilst visits to the Daily Mail skew to the 55+ group, a greater proportion of the ePetion site traffic comes from this group. 
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 12:12 PM
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- E-Petitions or How participatory should democracy be? (Tobias Escher at the OII)
The (not so new anymore) e-petitions site of the Prime Minister is all over the news today and Bill was already blogging about it: Tonight saw the deadline for people to register with a petition against road pricing (the long response time seems to be ... [Read More]
Comments
The main driver for traffic came from people forwarding messages to all their friends urging them to sign it. It would be really interesting to know how many emails each signatory was sending out, and how many got the message and chose not to sign it. This critical factor, which predicts whether there is a run-away reaction like this, is probably impossible to measure.
Posted by Julian Todd | February 21, 2007 07:23 AM
Julian, Thanks for your comment. We did see quite a bit of traffic coming to the site from email. In fact, last week, 21.11% of visits to the ePetitions website came from web based email services (i.e. Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail). This compares to 20.52% from search.
Because we report on website visits, we can't see traffic coming from desktop based email services, so the proportion of traffic from email is likely even higher.
You are right - it would be really interesting to see how many emails each signatory sent out.
Posted by Heather Hopkins | February 21, 2007 09:32 AM
Heather,
this is a timely and interesting analyses. I was wondering whether you could provide any more figures on the development of the traffic over time, e.g. since its launch?
Maybe I'm asking for too much but what I would also be interested in (and I could imagine maybe some more people that regularly read your blog) how the UK government websites ranking has changed since then. You just mention the petition site is now number one but could you specify when that happened and how the rest of the table looks like now?
Maybe that's too much but I thought it doesn't hurt asking.
Best, tobias
Posted by Tobias Escher | February 21, 2007 03:36 PM
How does the age demographic compare with Daily Mail readership?
The media reports gave no impression of who was signing the petition. This data is probably newsworthy in itself. Has anyone told Mr Blair :-)
Posted by Kevin Lewis | February 22, 2007 01:58 AM
Heather, great stats. Manoj
Posted by Manoj Ranaweera | February 20, 2007 08:43 AM