The referendum to decide whether to introduce a new voting system to replace our current first-past-the-post system is fast approaching. We have been tracking the debate on the Alternative Vote (AV) since the 1st January 2011.
For information on how we calculate influence please see our blog post looking at who is influential in the debate on the Royal Wedding.
We found the top 20 most influential websites in the global English debate on AV:
Table 1: Top 20 Influential Stakeholders in the Debate on the Alternative Vote
| Rank |
Name |
Website |
Influence |
| 1 |
The Guardian |
guardian.co.uk |
24.8 |
| 2 |
The Independent |
independent.co.uk |
24.0 |
| 3 |
The BBC |
bbc.co.uk |
17.5 |
| 4 |
Liberal Democrat Voice |
libdemvoice.org |
14.7 |
| 5 |
London Evening Standard |
thisislondon.co.uk |
14.4 |
| 6 |
Conservative Home Blogs |
conservativehome.blogs.com |
12.9 |
| 7 |
The Telegraph |
telegraph.co.uk |
11.5 |
| 8 |
The Spectator Magazine |
spectator.co.uk |
9.7 |
| 9 |
The Liberal Democrats Website |
libdems.org.uk |
9.1 |
| 10 |
The New Statesman |
newstatesman.com |
8.9 |
| 11 |
Next Left Blog |
nextleft.org |
7.8 |
| 12 |
Left Foot Forward Blog |
leftfootforward.org |
7.4 |
| 13 |
Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors |
aldc.org |
6.6 |
| 14 |
Total Politics Magazine |
totalpolitics.com |
6.3 |
| 15 |
UK Polling Report |
ukpollingreport.co.uk |
5.7 |
| 16 |
The Daily Mail |
dailymail.co.uk |
5.6 |
| 17 |
The Conservative Party Website |
conservatives.com |
5.5 |
| 18 |
Labour List |
labourlist.org |
5.4 |
| 19 |
Iain Dale's Diary |
iaindale.blogspot.com |
5.4 |
| 20 |
The Economist |
economist.com |
4.7 |
Interestingly, at this stage, the Liberal Democrat Voice is the most influential politics-focused website. Furthermore, of the nine websites dedicated to a particular political party, five of those had a penchant for the Liberal Democrats, compared to three for the Conservatives and one for Labour. Whether this will have an effect on the results of the referendum, we will have to wait and see.
Report compiled during the period 1st January 2011 – 12th April 2011. Please email me (sophie.hill@onalytica.com) if you would like further information on findings presented in this blog post.
It’s been a couple of months since we discussed politics or the election on our blog; however, we continue to monitor the influence of various sites and voices using InfluenceMonitor™ and have seen the below results in this past week which are interesting.
Table 1 below shows the top 15 influential voices on politics in the UK. It also shows their change in influence since last week.
Table 1 - Top 15 Voices on Politics (UK) – W/C 4th Oct 2010
Table 2 shows the 10 voices that gained the most influence since last week.
Table 2 - Top 10 Gainers since last week
Mentioned in the above listings are: Guardian, www.guardian.co.uk BBC, www.bbc.co.uk Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk BBC News, www.news.bbc.co.uk, Independent, www.independent.co.uk Daily Mail, www.dailymail.co.uk Total Politics, www.totalpolitics.com FT, www.ft.com LibDemVoice, www.libdemvoice.org News Statesman, www.newstatesman.com Iain Dale, www.iaindale.blogspot.com Telegraphs Blogs, www.blogs.telegraph.co.uk Conservative Home, www.conservativehome.blogs.com Spectator, www.spectator.co.uk LabourList, www.labourlist.org Jewish Chronicle, www.thejc.com Guido Fawkes’ Blog, www.order-order.com Paul Waugh, Evening Standard, www.waugh.standard.co.uk Taxpayers Alliance, www.taxpayersalliance.com Number 10, www.number10.gov.uk This is London, www.thisislondon.co.uk FT Blogs, www.blogs.ft.com Scottish National Party, www.snp.org
Reading the World Wide Web
With the internet now a mainstream media, and the majority of households in the UK having broadband accounts – it is understandable that the internet has now grown to such a size that it can be overwhelming, and sometimes confusing when searching for specific information. According to Google, the number of unique URLs online has surpassed 1 trillion and continues to grow rapidly. If this content could be sorted, categorised and filtered into relevant intelligence it could be hugely valuable for organisations and governments alike.
In our new White Paper released today Using the Internet as a Market Research Database, we have taken the UK Election as a case study and used InfluenceMonitor™ to do the leg work for us in trawling the internet for relevant content enabling us to draw some very interesting and insightful conclusions.
Download our White Paper here: Using the Internet as a Market Research Database to find out more about some of these findings such as: how changes in the daily election poll results could be estimated by measuring the changes in the relative amount of online discussion.
Click on the icon below to download a copy of the complete White Paper as a PDF:
Alternatively, view a slideshow that gives an overview of the White Paper:
Another interesting example of how influence has developed over time comes from looking at the blog of
Iain Dale. Mr. Dale is a prominent political commentator whose blog has gained quite a following.
The graph below shows the influence of Mr. Dale’s blog when the topic is “David Cameron”. The baseline is again the influence of the BBC (same context).
We can see that the Influence of Mr. Dale’s blog in February was roughly 8% of that of the BBC.Since then his relative influence (compared with the BBC’s) has grown steadily – until the end of June. Here it took a bit of drop.
However, it is likely that the drop was attributable to a surge in the general influence of the BBC on the topic of David Cameron.
Using the contextual influence of The Guardian as a baseline for Mr. Dale’s blog reveals that he is still doing well. (See below).Benchmarking influence aside it is actually interesting to see how much influence a blog can carry on a major topic. Mr. Dale’s influence on the debate on David Cameron currently stands at about 15% of that of the BBC and just under 60% of that of The Guardian.
