Since Howard's federal election victory on October 9, Green Left Weekly's website has had a huge surge of visitors.
It seems that many people, faced with the horrible prospect of three more years of Coalition government attacks on workers, refugees, women, the environment and our civil rights, and further warmongering around the world, realised that they need an antidote to the lies, and a voice that stands up for their interests.
GLW's website in recent weeks has had the highest traffic in its history — even higher than at the peak of the movement against the war on Iraq. October averaged 9500 visitors per day. September had averaged 7858, and August 7284. The first four days of issue #604 averaged 13,000 visitors daily. On October 28, 67,592 articles were read.
The interest seems to be on all political issues and is coming from Australia and around the world. Search engines are also increasingly directing web surfers to GLW — last month 918 visitors came looking for "James Hardie", 558 for "John Martinkus" and 346 for "Afghanistan elections".
During the six weeks of the election campaign, the GLW site was nearly always in the top five political websites measured by Hitwise and printed each day in the Australian Financial Review. Mostly GLW was second or third, ahead of the mainstream parties' websites.
In the last week of the campaign, visitors to the ALP site and the Liberal Party's site both increased. But immediately after the election, traffic to the ALP site plummeted, a total contrast to the increased interest in the GLW site, as the accompanying two graphs produced by traffic ranking company Alexa show (<http://www.alexa.com>).
From Green Left Weekly, November 3, 2004.
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