Or maybe the O'Reilly Bump. Or, perhaps most accurately, the YearlyKos bump. Whatever you want to call it, it's clearly that dKos has experienced a surge of new people recently. Anyone who's looked at the intros to jotter's daily summaries will know this, with hundreds of new users signing up every day. So, what's going on?
Let me start with an overview:
This is the number of registered users (i.e. highest UID) vs. date, starting with the onset of the Scoop version of dKos in October of 2003 up through day before yesterday. The original story behind this graph is in this diary from last year.
On the overview, it's pretty clear that something unusual has been going on for roughly the last month, as the rate of new registrations has gone up significantly. Could it be the "bump" that all political guests on the Colbert Report experience? Could all the new people be Bill O'Reilly-inicited trolls? Or could they all be attracted by the pulse of regular media coverage of Yearly Kos? I'd guess mostly the last, with some of the first two. But I don't know.
Anyway, away from the speculation and back to the graphs. We can see the growth in registrations a bit more clearly by looking at both the total number of registrations and the registration rate (UIDs/day):
Now, I should note that the data on this graph has been fairly heavily smoothed, to eliminate daily spikes and bring out the long-term trends. In this graph, we can see a few different trends at different times. The first growth phase, going up to roughly September of 04, saw an average of about 50 people per day. Then the Presidential race really heated up, Wolf Blitzer was on TV saying "bloggers" every night like he had just discovered some strange new tribe deep in the Amazon rainforest, and the registration rate soared (phase 2). After the election, things came back down to Earth, though at a higher level then before (roughly 100 per day), ending with a smaller spike in the summer of last year. That's YK06, with the small peak on the right shoulder corresponding to the midterm election.
Then we come to the doldrums. From just about Election day to roughly a month ago, the rate of newcomers fell way off. Back down to almost the 50 per day of the early days. Had we jumped the shark? Did a Democratic Congress mean that people were less interested in joining a Democratic political blog?
But then, The Bump happened. Here's what it looks like without any smoothing:
Now, I know people are going to ask about that big single-day spike in late May. That was the day after Cindy Sheehan's GBCW diary, which attracted quite a bit of MSM coverage. Beyond that, it's clear that something started to happen in mid to late July, with the registration rate starting to trend up and up and up. Mid July was a bit early for most of the regular media coverage of YearlyKos, but it was about the time that Bill started his Nazi/KKK/Communist/Mongol Horde frothing-at-the-mouth "coverage" of this site. It's pretty clear that all the on-air ranting, along with accompanying mockery both here and at places like Countdown started to attract a whole big group of new users. The question, of course, is how many of them are/were genuinely interested, and how many are trolls.
Unlike previous spikes, this one kept going and going and going. First O'Reilly's rantings. Then Keith Olbermann's mockery. Coverage on the Colbert Report, culminating with Markos appearing as a guest. Then YearlyKos itself. But that all ended two or three weeks ago. The Bump has kept on going. It's only just now dying off, with yesterday being the first day in over a month that we've had less than 100 new users sign up. That's a lot.
It's also interesting to compare this with last year's YK spike:
Firstly, we can see the "doldrums" of this year, with the pre-convention rate this year being noticeably lower than last year. But last year, the spike of publicity and consequent spike in registrations only lasted for about a week, and then things quickly returned back to normal. This year, things were quite different. There were noticeable spikes before and after the convention itself, and the whole thing lasted for about a month. It does seem to be winding down, finally.
Another interesting feature seen in this graph is the weekly periodicity in registration rate. Unsurprisingly, there aren't quite as many people signing up on the weekend.
So, What Does It All Mean? No clue. Beyond the obvious fact that publicity really does make a difference, I'm not sure there's any deep meaning to these plots. But, they're still interesting to look at and speculate. So, let's speculate....
In my previous diary on this subject, I expressed concern that the period of slow registration growth, which was accompanied by a comparable drop in overall traffic, might be a harbinger of the peaking of the blogosphere's impact, that without a steady stream of new participants, it might be difficult to maintain the vigor that is one of our main hallmarks. Looking back with an additional 8 months' perspective, I would say that while there's a germ of truth in that fear, the death of this site, and the blogosphere in general, is not imminent. While the past year has seen a relatively small influx of new people, it's clear that under the right conditions, significant numbers of people can still be drawn here in a relatively short period time. And that suggests that as we enter into the period of the Presidential cycle when more and more people are actually paying attention, we should start seeing a greater influx of new members. Maybe not at the rate of 400 per day, but still a healthy influx.
-dms