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Libertas Says They Dominate The Interwebz
Read more about: Libertas 
Follow up post on Simon’s earlier post
Hilarious press release from Libertas was waiting for me in my inbox when I arose from my slumber this morning. Thank you, Chairman Ganley for brightening my day. The rather excellent headline of “Libertas.eu the most visited political party website worldwide” was clicked on with a cynical smirk. I read on…
Brussels, May 15th: Libertas.eu, the website of the pan European people’s movement for more democracy, accountability and transparency in the EU, had more visitors mid-week than any other political party in the world. Figures from Alexa, the web tracking company, for Wednesday May 13th , show Libertas blazing ahead, leaving even the US Democratic party website trailing.
Once I saw ‘Alexa.com’ it was confirmation, this is complete bollocks. Alexa.com collects details on the number of visits and way people visit websites using information it collects from people who use the Alexa plug-in as they browse. It can be semi-decent if used in a wikipedia-like manner (i.e. don’t trust it!) but most of the time it should be taken with coronary-inducing size pinches of salty goodness. As Michele Neylon of Blacknight Hosting told me earlier…
“Alexa is not accurate because it’s very easy to mess up the figures, the demographic using the Alexa toolbar is not a representative sample of people online, that’s why if you look at the Alexa Top 100 for Ireland you’d think there were far more Chinese and Polish people here than there actually is. My personal blog is ranked higher than Libertas.eu according to the Alexa Traffic Ranking, while Alexa has the Irish Webmasters Forum ranked higher than the US Democrats website, that puts things in some perspective. That’s because the type of people viewing my blog and Irish Webmasters would be the same people who use the Alexa toolbar in their line of work. Hence, I’m ranked higher, what Libertas have claimed is meaningless.”
In slightly more simple terms, what Michele is saying is if Libertas got enough of their supporters/employees to download the Alexa toolbar they could effectively alter the Alexa stats over a 3/4 month period – that’s the flaw with Alexa, the toolbar isn’t widespread enough, it’s usually only downloaded by people working in the online development and search engine optimisation areas. But, it should be said Libertas weren’t using the Alexa Traffic Rankings in their press release, they were using the comparison graph.
John McGurk, Libertas’ press officer got a call from me about it. I asked him if he would release Google Analytics stats or something similar that people who work in the area may actually give some weight to. He refused saying “we don’t use Google Analytics or Statpress, Alexa is what we use”. Classic, Alexa is a completely different and far, far less reliable counter than Google Analytics and Statpress. I asked him if he would be releasing numbers on how many people viewed the site because Alexa only gives vague estimations on the percentage of people who were online globally viewed one particular website. He wouldn’t, he refused to give me any information on how many views, impressions, uniques etc that Libertas.eu received, insisting that the Alexa stats were there to see and could be disputed if I wished to do so. No info? Where’s the transparency lads? Well John, yeah, I’m disputing the Alexa stats…
Let’s put things in perspective:
Using Libertas’ methods this blog gets 1/7th of the amount of hits the busiest political party website in the whole big wide world gets. This blog gets approx 2,000 daily views
Mulley gets half the daily reach that the world’s most popular website for a political party gets, according to the Libertas methods of using Alexa.
Michele Neylon’s blog is excellent but to be fair to the man, his media profile is small enough nationally and certainly not ‘pan-European’ like Libertas, yet his blog has nearly half the reach of Libertas.eu according to Alexa.
Then there’s the rather baffling situation where MiCandidate who are claiming 110,000 views a week have less reach than Niall Harbison’s blog according to Alexa. I’ve no doubt MiCandidate are getting more views than Niall Harbison, but it once again goes to show the inaccuracy of Alexa. Niall publishes his stats and averages around 500 a day.
Ah… I could go on but it’s just ridiculous – I truly hope none of the papers fall for this and print on it. If so I’ll be writing copy and hoping they print corrections/clarifications.
My money is on the Daily Mail.
– After the research I’ve done today I swear never to use Alexa again. Ever.
UPDATE: David Cochrane – Former (possibily current, David?) Libertas employee knows all about fiddling the Alexa numbers… See Semper idem
“I truly hope none of the papers fall for this”
So send in an article debunking it. The IT for one would probably carry it.
Any change we could get all of Irish Election’s readers to download Alexa and by August we could claim to be more popular than Libertas?
From the Politics.ie web kit: http://semper-idem.eu/?p=549
and then I notice the trackback…
in what way is wikipedia not trustworthy?
In the way that you wouldn’t believe it if it told you you had the biggest party-political site in the world.
but it doesn’t
Political scandal to end all scandals
Shock, Horror where will it end, a new scandal to end all scandals.
Libertas EU have threatened to stop the troughing and sleaze in Europe.
Libertas have threatened the whole of EU’s institutions, stating that they intend to bring Democracy, accountability and transparency to the EU.
Is this the end of politics as we know it?
Are their demands unreasonable?
How will Europe cope with real democracy?
Just how will the citizens of Europe react to a Europe that works for them.
find answers at http://www.libertas.eu
Edward, thanks so much for the link to the libertas site. And the push for their, erm, policies? Aside from being for freedom, democracy and ponies (and lets face it, who isnt?) have you any inkling about what they would do once elected?
How about a vote on workers rights? What will inform their position? Will there be a whip? What position do they take? I can vote for any party in the knowledge that democracy will be sake – by the very act of my voting. What I cannot do and what libertas.eu fails to tell me is vote for them according to my issues.
Less of the pony press nuggets and a bit more details please.
By the way shouldn’t a Libertas candidate declare an interest like that? And how come you are posting from a sky.com IP?
Cian, I thought it was pro-kittens platform that Libertas were standing on not ponies. I’m so gutted that they’ve abandoned the kittens.
Cian, don’t Sky sell broadband in the UK? At any rate, Edward was probably only here to spam and run. I doubt we’ll hear from him again.
Niall, believe it or not Ed was over at the Campaign Watch site too. Does this make him a spree commenter (cos it was in the same time period) or a serial commenter cos his MO is the same each time?