Aggregate Analysis

Between July 6 and December 12, the Reform Party web site received over three quarter of a million raw page hits, and nearly 125,000 hits on the site's front page.¹⁹ While these statistics do not bear a great deal of weight on their own, they are being provided as a baseline for comparison of individual sections and pages. The front page (http://www.reformparty.org/index.html) is the page that loads when a user enters the address of the site without specifying a particular page, and the page to which most links from other sites point. As a result, most users will hit the front page before going elsewhere in the site. Thus, the number of hits on the front page provides probably the most accurate available count of visitors to the site, to which it is possible to compare the number of hits on other individual pages and sections. Throughout the rest of this paper, any reference to "number of visitors" will refer to the number of hits on the front page, unless otherwise noted.

During the period studied, from July 6 to December 12, 1996, the Reform Party web site received an average of 4,750 hits and 779 visits per day. During the prime period of the on-line campaign, between (but not including) the Reform Party convention and election day the average hits and visits were 5894 and 939, respectively. Because of the special nature of the convention period and of election day, and the large numbers of hits received during these periods, it is important to ignore them when discussing an average day, because these periods of one or two days each saw more than four times the number of hits per day than any other day, thus skewing our picture of a truly average, normal day for the Reform Party web site.