Posted on 08/13/2007 12:19:41 PM PDT by kristinn
Is there any chance of the Republicans catching up to the Democrats online in 2008? From any angle, the picture looks rosy if you're a Democrat and bleak if you're a Republican.
-- According to Hitwise.com, which tracks the surfing behavior of 10 million Americans across 1 million sites, online interest in the Democrats is way ahead of the Republicans. For example, for the week ended Aug. 4, the Democrats drew a whopping 66 percent of all the traffic to candidate websites.
-- In terms of donations online, the Democratic field reports raising more than $28 million, versus about $9.4 million for the Republicans. While we don't think you can meaningfully separate online donations from the rest anymore, even the reported differences are stark. Overall, the Democratic field has outraised the Republicans by $180 million to $117 million in the first half of 2007.
-- The number of small (under $200) donors to the Democratic field, 94,833, is 50 percent greater than the Republicans' 63,248, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics [ ].
-- On the big social networking sites MySpace.com and Facebook.com, the Democratic field has accumulated more than 611,000 friends, compared to about 219,000 for the Republicans, according to our techPresident tracking tools.
-- Interest in online messaging from the Democrats is also clearly higher when you look at how many times their videos have been viewed on YouTube.com: nearly 9 million times, compared to 7.3 million for the Republican field (of which, it's worth noting, nearly 3 million views were of Ron Paul's videos).
These kinds of numbers are starting to stir a spirited debate among Republican activists about whether their party is not only on a path to losing the 2008 election but also headed toward a longer period of second-class status as the online arena becomes more important to politics.
They look at the YearlyKos convention in Chicago, which brought together some 1,500 Netroots Democrats the first weekend in August, and wonder, "Where's our YearlyKos?"
Some Republicans clearly think all these dynamics will change in their favor once the primary battles are over and the Democrats nominate front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, the right's bête noire.
Indeed, Sen. Clinton does generate nearly as much mobilization on the online right as President Bush does on the left; for example, the biggest Stop Hillary group on Facebook now has more than 358,000 members, more than the so-called "Million Strong" group for Barack Obama.
But Patrick Ruffini, the former e-campaign director for the Republican National Committee (and briefly an adviser to the Rudy Giuliani campaign), argues that there's a deeper problem on the Republican side of the online equation.
He notes that conservatives don't lack for their own YearlyKos, as thousands of right-wingers have been gathering for years at the annual CPAC conference. And he argues that in sheer traffic terms, sites like the Drudge Report and Free Republic still outdraw their left-wing competitors – which is true.
To Ruffini, the Republican problem online is rooted in an older culture that has stopped innovating and has failed to embrace the sort of cooperative networking practices and freewheeling activism that collectively has produced so much new energy on the Democratic side.
"Drudge has made clear he disdains blogs," Ruffini writes on his blog. "The site looks the same as it did in 1997. … There is no interactivity on Drudge. You go there, read, refresh, and that's it." As for Free Republic, Ruffini points to a whole set of things the site’s owners have done that have stifled the formation of a vibrant community.
"The founders made the decision that they were going to hoard as much traffic on their servers as possible. … Early on, links to blogs were verboten. If you expressed your own opinion when starting a thread, that was a 'vanity' and it was frowned upon. And fundraising for candidates was strictly forbidden, except for those pet causes approved by [the site's owner]. … What lessons did our activists learn from this? Freepers, who were our best online activists, never learned how to swarm to other sites, to take different kinds of actions and to raise money for conservative candidates."
What all this means is it’s highly unlikely Republicans are going to turn the tide online – not until they wean themselves off their top-down habits and start using the Web more to foster community and collaboration.
Right now, we don't see much sign of this happening (except among supporters of Ron Paul) – but we know plenty of Republicans who are watching how well the Democrats are doing this cycle, taking notes and making plans.
Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry are, respectively, the founder and editor of Personal Democracy Forum, a daily website and annual conference on how technology is changing politics.
Free Republic and Drudge are, after all, not part of the Republican party ~ but DailyKos is definitely the mouthpiece for the Nazis. Democrats affiliate with that steaming P-S at their own risk.
We do?
Uh-huh - stopped right there.
Links to blogs are NOT verboten. However, to keep FR from getting overwhelmed by blob pimps, blog links are not mixed in with news.
The discouragement of vanity posts also serves to keep FRs signal to noise ratio well above that of other sites.
Put up an online poll, stand back, and THEN say that, punk.
Well you can thank all the Rudy Giuliani people for driving dozens of otherwise good conservatives away from FR to other sites.
Too funny. Ruffini is still trying to get the license plate of the truck that ran over him, and then went around the block and creamed him again. Both Rudy and the RNC got taken to the woodshed by the grassroots over their liberalism and support of shamnesty.
I never knew that FR was a Republican site. I knew that Kos was a Democrat site though.
The GOP was at some point offering a 30% bounty to sites who drummed up donations for the party. I don’t know if that is still so. If it isn’t, I guess it didn’t work out so well.
Yeah, all FR is is the most up-to-date and comprehensive news digest the world has ever seen. This site makes Drudge redundant. The author fails to ‘get’ that keeping opinion under control is what makes this site. Not that there aren’t ample opportunities for opinions to be shared. In fact, I’d say that people look at this site and miss the news dissemination in favor of the opinion. But this is how news is going to work when the titans crumble.
Yes, exactly, and what does “cooperative networking practices and freewheeling activism” mean, exactly? Do I hear chickens running around with their heads cut off?
Most of these statistics just show that democrats have a much larger base of basement loser-types who spend all their time surfing the web, making changes to their facebook entries, and pretending that the internet is a rational replacement for a real life.
Meanwhile, republicans mostly have jobs and see the internet as a tool, not as a “community” where they live.
So I use FR to get news stories and commentary on those stories, a typical liberal uses the internet to get “me-to” esteem points from other clueless liberals.
They also don’t ‘get’ that FR is the arch-enemy of the RINO republicans.
My response to Mr Ruffini can be found here:
http://www.townhall.com/blog/g/9219ea7e-9210-4789-81aa-467505597a5b?comments=true#comments
Go to the very last commnent by Collins (that’s me)
What a yutz!
Who needs to go to a candidates political web site? All I have to do is goto FreeRepublic to get the info I need.
We have several notches in our belt. When we get busy we can move mountains, and we have. I believe that the first GOE outnumbered their antiwar protest by about five times, for instance.
Exactly, which is why rino’s and folks who are rino’s and panderers don’t like us.
drudge swamps kos, freerepublic is slightly behind. alexa.com isnt the most reliable but it gives a general idea of internet traffic rankings.
Who would send hard-earned money to a Lindsey Graham?
Needs to be said again.
Damn straight.
Offhand, I'd say that isn't true. Just look at all the requests to "Freep this poll". Hell, I learned the power of Freeping over 10 years ago. During the whole Lewinsky mess, I posted links to bunches of polls daily. And here's how I knew that we had an effect.
The New York Daily News had a poll. I don't remember the question but I linked it along with a bunch of others. The published results was a "surprising" 68% (somewhere in the high 60s at any rate). A few days later, there was a follow-up. The reporter noted that most of the traffic on that poll came from a single site: Free Republic. If Free Republic votes were filtered out, the result was in the low to mid 50s, which was still anti-Clinton, but nowhere near as bad.
What I got from that was that I could post one link on FR and sway an online poll about 15%. Damn!! The power of the net. The power of FR.
Freepers, who were our best online activists, never learned how to swarm to other sites, to take different kinds of actions and to raise money for conservative candidates.”
Wow, this guy doesn’t have a clue.....(chuckle)
Maybe it is because most Republicans are too busy WORKING and LIVING to spend all day on blogs and websites.
I pop in here from time to time, but I took almost the entire summer off from posting. I have three kids, a full time job and a deployed husband. As much as I would have loved to post, it just wasn’t possible with the kids off of school. They needed more interaction than during the school year, and my youngest daughter spent most of the summer quite sick.
Some of the best journalists run their own blogs (Michael Yon... Roggio of 4th Rail.. Michael Totten... Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, etc)
We all complain about the MSM.. about its bias and omissions and then yet we exalt them as something special to keep the bloggers from polluting.
When I try to share important Iraq news that comes from a blog, some busy body will immediately banish it to the “Blogs” category and then no one sees it.
Tell me.. what is the advantage of this?
And they got pissed when FR showed resistance was NOT futile, and we would NOT be assimilated.
Any “man” who uses MySpace and FaceBook traffic statistics to drive home a political hack talking point isn’t a man in my book.
The Sifry brothers are open partisans, so it’s not worth getting any further into this fluff piece.
I hope so. My thought is that the Republicans are more practical, and still quite busy taking care of life. A lot of college kids live online, and they are heavily Democrat. The Republican base is out running businesses and raising kids. They can’t take time to get online.
My guess is they’ll become more engaged as the election gets closer and the Republican field narrows.
I mean, several contenders haven’t even officially entered the race yet, for us. I know I am holding my donations until after.
The desire is to maintain a good signal to noise ratio. Bloggers can always find FR threads related to their latest rant, and post some of their entry on that thread along with a link. That way, the blog post is put in context of the news story, and blog threads don't overwhelm the news threads.
Odd statement. I think what I observed was people with a willingness to consider Rudy Giuliani being driven away, not them driving others.
No, there are a lot of former Freepers, all very conservative, who have either cut way back on activity or completely left the site. I have reduced my participation, mainly because the invaders have been left unchecked, and the political correctness has become unbearable.
Ding ding ding!
We have a winner here!
Ah, I see what you meant.
Ditto!
In my opinion, the Focus Forum software needs a major overhaul. It could be easier to use, and new capabilities added like embedded Flash-based features such as YouTube video. High-quality presentation and production values can be a powerful influence in winning hearts and minds.
I don’t know that we qualify as a Republican site, especially seeing as how we kinda pummelled that poor hapless Bush administration flunkie who was sent here to “engage” us on the topic of immigration reform.
While what you say is indeed true, FR has become a a model T compared to other community websites. The poll was the latest addition to interactivity but cmon, that was eons ago. This place is post, reply & read. There is grouping by states but for as long as I have been here, there is ZERO ability to form groups to lead a charge anywhere besides a thread and those are hard enough to follow as it is.
I do blame the community here too. When John tried to change the site all of the older members went into a tizzy about change and cried for "keeping things the same!". Talk about the definition of conservative. Geez.
I know this is Jim's baby and he is the ultimate decider, but I believe this site needs an organized board. A team of people who can do a little hiring for SEO, graphic design and community administrator.
I feel that there is just no direction at FR in terms of activism. There is "Meet us at the white house at noon" threads but there is no emailing members reminders or messaging about the talking points.
There is no calandering or scheduling. Very basic things to move people and mmotivate them to join a cause.
FR has become stale in relation to other places I have seen.
After being in the online world for the better part of 5 yrs, FR has changed zero. None. The online world changes by the month yet FR sits here, looking and acting the same and hardly being any more of a catalyst than it was when Clinton was in office. The only thing that's different is the tone and the number of members here.
In my opinion, if FR doesn't become more in tune with todays tools for activism, FR will slowly fade into oblivion and nows not the time for FR to do that.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Let me take this opportunity to suggest that Freepers go to http://www.reddit.com/ several times a day and downvote all the the moonbats you possibly can and upvote all the conservatives.
Maybe we could eventually take it over.
That would really piss them off.
I think both have deserted. Lots of good conservatives have left. They may not have removed their accounts, they just aren’t participating any longer. I could name over a dozen, but I won’t. I will let them enjoy their privacy.
Ruffini sounds like somebody who has been banned and is bitter. If so, HA HA.
Yeah, it’s rediculous. It’s like someone read his own article, and then re-reported it and interviewed him. Politico is a joke.
So people who make the country work don’t spend as much time on line. Go figure.
This twit Ruffini sure is getting quoted a lot.
About what you’d expect from the Politico. After all, they have Jim VandenHei, the very same correspondent that whined about Fox News being on (aboard Air Force One?).
I think Consevatives are more likely to read liberal sites whereas Liberals don’t want to read anything contrary to what they believe. Therefore the more liberal sites are picking up hits from both conservatives and liberals.
From afar, it seems to me that the Democrats have outsourced their party’s organizing, networking, fund-raising, and policy-making functions to the nutroots crowd. This seems like a fatal error to me. What’s left for the DNC to do?
There have been several instances in the past where if I was not somehow able to slip the link to my blog into a post the real story might not get out - and even then still there are many who will take CNN's word over a fellow FReeper.
A few cases come to mind -
Im not going to look it up at the moment, but on one occasion the MSM was reporting that a huge protest was planned at the US embassy here with regard to some outrage - I remember waking up the next morning fixing myself a cup of coffee and running off to the embassy - by the time I got there it had started raining and there was hardly anyone who had arrived yet - I waited several hours and counted like a dozen people at the peak - nothing big and nothing to report really - But when I got back that afternoon and checked FR, the MSM was reporting that like 500 people were there protesting - The majority of FR never got the true story.
Another - and one that really gets my gall - was the Barack Obama Indonesia Story and the CNN Debunking. Remember that one? I do. I spent a hell of a lot of time on the phone - traveling and translating Indonesian media reports - all for pretty much nothing I feel.
Remember the CNN debunking?
"Vause reported he saw boys and girls dressed in neat school uniforms playing outside the school, while teachers were dressed in Western-style clothes"
CNN seemed to avoid the reality..
Tiap Jumat, anak sekolah mengenakan pakaian Muslimah, termasuk yang beragama non-Muslim .
And my translation of the Indonesian media report:
"Each Friday, all the school childen must wear Muslim clothes and that also includes children who are non-muslim."
Good thing that John Vause with CNN didn't do his report on a Friday
To this very day I think that half of FR believes the CNN reports - Oh and there is more -
I would think that at the time that should have been considered Breaking News don't you? Well here at FR it is not. CNN reports on the other hand - yes they are considered real news.
How about the tsunami? I think I was the first one to post photos on the web -
-------------------------------------------------------
This is a subject that I'm not sure how to resolve - Yes I realize that I post the link to my blog a lot - and I have received a few nasty FReepmails here accusing me "Blog Pimping" ~~ I never heard of someone being accused of pimping CNN. And so leave FR to pimp CNN and Yahoo News? I'm not sure what the answer is - but I will be honest and tell you that I'm very sensitive about it and if Jim Rob or someone ask me to stop then I guess I will have to.
I might be wrong, but I dont feel that many FReepers really place any value in blogs and I dont mind saying that FR is not entirely blog friendly - Sure I can post a story in FR Blog Section and it will never get seen - I might as well post it in the Smokey Back Room.
So in any event, I'm not sure what to do really - I'd love to share real news with my fellow FReepers and offer my perspective from here - and it goes without saying that I would love to build up my blog - but at the same time I dont want to be accused of blog pimping - so what to do?
Anyway rant off....
From the sound of things, there probably needs to be some way to get news-oriented blogging (as opposed to straight opining) into the news section of FR. Folks such as yourself, who are out in the field and in a position to counter nonsensical reporting from the MSM, should have a vehicle.
JimRob, perhaps FR could maintain a list of news-oriented blogs that, when the blogger is posting on a news event, would be allowed to post in News as opposed to Blogging? There could be some kind of application/review process for this and a list of such blogs maintained and published. Kinda like FR press credentialing for bloggers. It would be up to the blogger to use such credentials responsible, and, if a subsequent post is just editorializing, post that directly into bloggers.
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