I recently made my first donation to Senator Barack Obama's campaign website and noticed their nifty banner updating their progress in attracting donors.
When I first donated, they were already well on their way to 1,000,000. I also noticed how frequently they updated the link, so I decided see if I could figure out how fast they were attracting new donors. Being a bit of a geek, I decided to collect many data points to see how that rate varies. One thing led to another, and next thing I knew, I had written an automated script that downloads their banner every 10 minutes, yanks out the text, prints it, and makes a graph based on the data.
Anyway, I thought it was kinda cool, so I thought I'd share my results with anyone who was interested. Right now I'm guessing that the Obama Campaign will surpass 1,000,000 sometime Tuesday, February 26th in the afternoon. It could be the next day, but hey, what's the fun of a prediction if you hedge too much? If you want to see how this shapes up over the day, please go to my website, where I'm hosting the updated image. It updates every 10 minutes.
The donations seem to have peaked at more than 40 new donors / minute near the end of the work day. Seems like people surf a lot near 5pm or so. I'm very curious to see what today will bring.