It’s conservatives who’re making all the running in Britain’s burgeoning online political culture and leaving the left trailing in there wake, right?

No, not really – it’s just not that straightforward.

It is true that four of five most ‘successful’ political blogs – measured in terms of readership – are right wing blogs; Guido, Iain Dale, Conservative Home and EU Referendum (the fifth being Mike Smithson’s ‘Political Betting‘). However, none of these blogs, with the possible (and slight) exception of Iain’s could be considered to particularly ‘mainstream’ and the relative success of each, compared to other blogs, is best explained not in terms of vague notions such as ‘influence’ but simple in terms of each having successfully grabbed a particular niche for themselves.

Guido does tabloidised insider(ish) gossip which taps into a particular, if limited, anti-politics zeitgeist.

Iain, judging by the screenshot of his Google Analytics dashboard in this post and the high number of ‘hits’ going to his homepage (86%) relative to the number going to specific posts, is generating much of his traffic because he does a reasonably comprehensive job of aggregating news and information of interest (mainly) to conservatives, to which he adds the odd bit of gossip and first-run insider material.

Both Conservative Home and EU Referendum serve as focal points for right-wing conservative ‘themes’ which were previously rather more mainstream, in terms of the general direction of the Conservative Party but which have been moved increasingly towards the fringes as Cameron has taken the party into the centre ground.

And Political Betting does pretty much what it says ‘on the tin’, collating polling data and other information of interest to inveterate gamblers and the more psephologically inclined.

To put these sites into some sort of perspective, we can look at a couple of graphs generated using Alexa, the first of which compares the ‘reach’ of Guido and Iain with that of the websites of the Spectator and New Statesman and of the worst performing website of any national daily newspaper, the Daily Express:

To give a little further perspective, this second graph compares the Daily Express with three of the best performing national newspapers, the Telegraph, Daily Mail and Guardian:

So, on a good day, Iain and Guido do get up into much the same ballpark as niche monthly political titles like the Spectator and New Statesman, traffic-wise, but barely register at all when compared to the top performing daily newspapers – and to illustrate the point even further, the spike in the Telegraph’s traffic right at the end of March, which brought it up within touching distance of the Guardian was almost entirely generated by additional US traffic from a single article, this list of the 101 most useful websites, in which the only political site listed is They Work For You.

There is, however, another side to the story of Conservatives 2.0 which bears consideration and that’s the failure of the Conservative ‘mainstream’ to make any significant inroads into the electronic frontier despite having thrown a considerable amount of time and money at various web-based projects.

You starter for ten here is that the Conservative Party’s official website generates roughly the same amount of traffic as Conservative Home, and a fair bit less traffic than either Guido or Iain.

Then there’s the sorry tale of ‘Platform 10‘ which was supposedly going to become the Cameroonie answer to Conservative Home but which would perhaps have been better named ‘Died On Its Arse’ for all the interest it seems to generate. Although the site is regularly updated, it professes to be still in ‘beta mode’ – more for lack of interest from readers than anything else one suspects – and has its own Facebook group, the last wall post on which was made last November. Its ‘staff’ also seems to be more than a little inattentive as, despite posting this only last week:

I just got a spam email into my junk folder, ‘from’ “Maggy Thatcher” and promising me all sorts of delights if I bought their tablets.

Does the content tracker on gmail even work on spam?!

…no one appears to have noticed the 456 linkspam comments on this post, or the 714 linkspam comments on this one.

And then we come to the official efforts of the Conservative Party to colonise cyberspace, remembering, of course, that George Osborne considers himself the ‘Don’ of Web 2.0 and ‘Open Source Politics‘, even if his claims to have thought of all this before anyone else are nothing more than complete nonsense.

So how are the Tories doing?

Not at all well.

Remember the Tories first big push for on-line supremacy. There was, of course, the ‘sort-it’ viral campaign as pitched here by D-Cam himself?

This week, we will be launching “sort-it”, an innovative and provocative internet-based campaign designed to encourage young people to think about their own social responsibilities. The first issue we have chosen is personal debt, but many more will be addressed in the months ahead, such as racism and homelessness.

I’ve had to remove the links from the quotation as the ‘sort-it’ site no longer exists, in fact its signature achievement was to give John Prescott the opportunity to get away with a bit of trademark political knockabout during PMQs:

I notice from the papers and on television today that the Tories have now brought in a new person to get people to vote Tory, and I could not help noticing that the person is named, as I saw on the website, “Mr. Tosser“. I do not know which person on the Front Bench this man is modelled on, but let me tell the right hon. Gentleman that I always thought that his party was full of them, and that is why they have lost three elections.

And then there was Webcameron, for which the data from Alexa shows a two-week launch spike of about three times the traffic of Iain’s blog (as at October 2006) followed by a slow decline into relative obscurity. There are no current figures for traffic generated by Webcameron because, at some point late in 2007, the site was consolidated back into the main Conservative Party website, although Iain might have some idea of its numbers as just before it was pulled back in and its domain redirected to the official Tory site, it was pulling in about half the traffic of 18 Doughty Street during its wind down phase.

As an aside, the data for 18DS is rather interesting as, but for a short launch spike and a second spike around February/March 2007 – Iain might recall what it did to generate the additional traffic – 18DS ran at its peak at somewhere between a third and a half of the traffic his personal blog was generating.

Bringing things up to date, we’re currently a little over a month on from the launch of a £500,000 advertising campaign with all the trimmings – including a launch video produced by Matthew Vaughn, director of the film ‘Layer Cake’ – which aims to recruit ‘on-line friends’ for the Tory Party:

The Conservatives are launching a £500,000 advertising campaign to recruit online “friends” of the party.

In an echo of Radiohead’s recent album launch, there will be no fixed charge for becoming a Conservative supporter on Facebook, MySpace, iVillage or Bebo.

“People can pay as little or as much as they want to,” said shadow chancellor George Osborne in what he said was a groundbreaking move in UK politics.

So, one month on, how’s it all going?

Well, not that well, if truth be told.

Membership of the Conservative’s Facebook group is current running at just shy of 2,500, and while it has increased it membership since the launch of the current campaign by, perhaps, as much as a 1,000, it has to be acknowledged that the group, itself, was hardly a new one:

David Cameron sought to wrest the political initiative from Gordon Brown today by announcing nine Tory policy pledges in the first ever online-only advertising campaign by a political party, targeting young professionals and students on Facebook.

The advertisements are running on all the national newspaper websites, including the Guardian and the Independent, as well as Facebook and a number of popular websites. – The Guardian – 5/9/07

And that even with its increased membership, the Conservative’s group is still slightly smaller than ‘Am I the only person who doesn’t like David Cameron?’ and less than half the membership of ‘Everybody Hates Tories‘.

For the record, Labour’s Facebook group currently has a little over 3000 members on the back of no promotion whatsoever of late, while the Lib Dems Facebook presence has attracted almost 2800 members.

By way of an aside, the Guardian article cited above includes this clarification on a increasingly common theme when it comes to the Conservative Party and its activities on the electronic frontier.

The following clarification was made to this article on Thursday September 6 2007. Contrary to the claim made by the Conservative party and repeated in the article above, the advertisements are not the first online-only political campaign by one of the main parties. The Liberal Democrats have launched smaller online-only campaigns in the past.

So that’s Faceboo, but what about the other sites on which the Conservative Party launched its own networks?

Well, after Facebook, its next best effort turns out to be Bebo, which has a membership of 214 and attract comments like this one:

Woop 214 members now- And actually could i now take the opportunity to ask whether i could be made a moderator as well please; I am a strong supporter of the conservative party, especially Mrs Thatcher, and next years general election in the United Kingdom, will see our 18 year period in office returned to all its glory.

I do wonder, sometimes, whether the fetishisation of Thatcher by teenage Tories might not stem from much the same psychological processes that ensure that a 14 year old discovering rock music for the first time will invariably develop a taste for crap Norwegian Death Metal, only to develop something resembling musical taste and appreciation when they grow up. (On a personal note I’m pleased to say that my own 15 year old son managed to skip the Death Metal phase and move straight on to my collection of classic 70′s and 80′s punk, making him just about the only kid in school whose MP3 player sports the complete works of the The Clash, Bad Religion and the Dead Kennedys)

214 is something, I suppose, but not much, and with the majority of members being in the 16-22 age bracket, I doubt there’s much chance of screwing anything significant in the way of donations out of this network, but there’s come comfort for the Tories in the knowledge that Bebo ranks a pretty poor third behind MySpace and Facebook in the traffic stakes, drawing about 1% of the total amount of social networking traffic against Facebook’s 16% and MySpace’s 72% (Jan 2008 figures).

So that brings us to the current ‘daddy’ of social networking sites, MySpace – how are the Tories doing there?

Not very well at all – the current headcount for MySpace supporters is a princely 134 ‘friends’, less than a quarter of the number of members of an unofficial Tory group, which has been around since 2005 and has 589 members.

Oh dear, one month into a £500,000 campaign and the best they can do is 134 friends, including, in the grand Tory tradition of attracting celebrity endorsements you wouldn’t want to make a big deal out of, Amy Winehouse, late of the Priory Clinic. Is that better or worse than Jim Davidson? I’ll let you decide.

Oh, and before I forget – unlike the Tories who have forgotten already – there’s the little matter of the Tory’s presence on iVillage.

Now you might think that a site like iVillage, which is a kind of on-line version of Cosmo/Grazia, would be fertile ground for the Tory Party, what with Cameron’s supposed personal appeal to women voters, but if you’re looking for a link from the main Tory website to its iVillage network then forget it, the link that was there at the outset has been oh so quietly ditched after the iVillage network attracted a grand total of ONE member… a bloke from Newcastle named Jason.

So that’s £500,000 dropped on a campaign which, as a fair estimate – and without going through the tedious exercise of stripping out all the duplicate sign-ups by people who use more than one of these networks, and all the American sign-ups on Facebook that don’t appear to be ex-pats – has barely generated enough new on-line supporters to feed Iain Dale a half days traffic on a blog that costs him, what, about six quid a month for hosting a few images and perhaps the same again for the extended version of sitemeter to generate a bit of real-time statpR0n?

Yep, the Tories surely do ‘r00l’ the on-line world of politics.

Iain Dale recently posted this piece. which questions whether ‘size’ really matters, and broadly-speaking, there’s little to quibble with in Iain’s remarks. For most of us bloggers, size doesn’t matter that much, which is why most of us don’t bother with the whole statpR0n thing – after all, what does any of this cost us? A fiver a month? Maybe a tenner, top whack? I’ve run MoT for the last two years on an account that’s cost me a little over £100 and which will cost a little less to renew this time around thanks to the dollar/pound exchange rate having swing a bit further in my favour.

It does, however, become a very different matter if you’re dropping thousands of pounds on an on-line marketing exercise and generating very little by way of a return and the Tories best case scenario here is that their £500,000 campaign has netted them 1,500 or so ‘new friends’ give or take the number of duplicate sign-ups, non-UK non-expat sign-ups, who can neither vote or make donations unless they have a UK registered company and, let’s not forget, the number of sign=up who were already members of the Tory Party when they signed up for one of these networks, the number of which cannot be assessed.

Ian and Guido may only be the big fishes in a relatively small political blogging pond, but compared to the efforts of the Conservative Party, and the ‘Cameroons’ in particular, both must look like ‘giants’ of the on-line world when compared to the stream of high-cost busted flushes that keep emerging from Conservative Central Office.