Peter Boyle
If you were listening to the Australia Talks Back program on ABC Radio National on July 7, you would have heard Tessa Court, from the web monitoring company Hitwise, say: "If you look at the top websites that Australians visited just last week, Michael Moore was the number one, you know, global site that they went to. The second one was the 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly which has a huge proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds."
Sandy McCutcheon, the program's presenter responded, sceptically, "Can you give us an idea of the figures for something like 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, because a lot of people would say that they thought that was sort of very marginal?"
Court replied: "Very marginal, I mean, but of the people who visit the politics category, I mean they're capturing about, you know, 3%. You know there are a lot of sites in the politics category. We're looking at about 300 sites. So you know they're doing quite well."
The previous issue of GLW reported the top 10 political websites ranking published in the July 1 Australian. Taken from Hitwise, the ranking showed GLW way ahead of the websites of the Labor Party, the Liberals and the Greens.
Hitwise has registered GLW's web readership as well ahead of any other political website in Australia for some time now — a standing confirmed by other ranking agencies. But its latest ranking shows GLW's lead has grown.
A feature article by Jacqueline Maley in the July 2 Sydney Morning Herald noted GLW's lead. After claiming that "Australia's next government could be decided in cyberspace, where more Australians are heading for their fix of politics", Maley observed: "Last week, the most visited Australian political website was that of 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, the sister site to the far-left newspaper. For such small, alternative opinion-makers, the internet represents a level playing field..."
Maley went on to identify the internet as the place where an increasing proportion of young people get their politics. She wrote: "John Croll, the chief executive officer of the media analysts Media Monitors, believes these renegade sites could represent a threat to politics' big players. 'They are a great risk for political parties because they don't know what's being said about them, unless they have internet monitoring', he says.
"Croll says the internet is particularly useful in engaging young voters, who are likely to take at face value whatever they read on their favourite sites.
"Hitwise's statistics also show 32.6 per cent of visitors to Australian political websites are between 25 and 34. 'The younger voters don't buy newspapers and they're not going to be at home watching A Current Affair', Croll says. 'The internet is the way [young people] get a lot of their information ... they're used to searching through different sites to get the information they need for life'."
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, July 21, 2004.
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