2008 was quite a year. Just about a year ago were the Iowa caucuses, simultaneously signaling the end of the longest pre-primary season on record and the beginning of the longest primary season on record. There were quite a few ups and downs in the year that followed, but one number kept increasing the whole time, the number of people signing up for accounts at this place.
OK sure, there were other continually increasing numbers, like "total Obama campaign contributions" and "number of embarrassing Palin statements", but we all know that dkos UID is the really important one...
Before I start this analysis, I'd like to thank jotter, whose dedication in chronicling the ebbs and flows of this site is downright amazing. Almost all of the data presented below comes either from his High Impact Diary series, or from some additional data sets that he was kind enough to compile for me. The one exception is the registration data prior to mid-2005, which was provided by a bunch of people who all saved their "welcome to daily kos" registration email, as chronicled here.
We'll start with the Grand Overview, number of registered users since the beginning of the Scoop Era of Daily Kos (aka October 2003):
We see slow steady growth, followed by a spurt around the 2004 election, then the steadiness returns for a long period of mostly consistent growth (note, by the way, the absence of a large surge for the 2006 midterms. There's a bump, but it's considerably smaller). Moving on through 2007, there's an interesting jump around August/September. No elections then to spark interest, so what was going on? Well, it turns out that that was a Colbert Bump. Or possibly an O'Reilly Bump. Read the diary at the link; it'll make sense (I hope). Moving onwards, things start to perk up around the beginning of 2008, as the primary season really got going. Then, with the general election in the fall, hordes of new people started paying extra attention to politics, and registrations started coming fast and furious (definitely furious, to be sure...). During the post-election lull, the great odometer ticked over across 200,000, and now here we are in a new year.
Now, lets' look a bit more carefully at the trends. An obvious first question is "how did this year's surge compare to the surge in 2004?". To answer that, I'll plot registrations for 2008, and overlay the same data from 2004, shifting it vertically so that the two start at the same point:
The overall shape of the two years is about the same; steady growth through the summer, fast growth prior to the general election, and then a lull in the late fall/early winter. There are a couple of differences that stand out, though. The first is that more people registered in 2008 than in 2004. 2008 saw just under 55,000 new users clicking the "Create Account" link; 2004 saw under 35,000. Of course, that 35k made up a much larger fraction of the total userbase; there were only about 5000 registered users at the start of 2004.
The other major difference is when the pre-election surge started. In 2004, registrations really started to pick up towards the beginning of October, whereas last year, the rapid growth period kicked off at least a month earlier. This year, we sustained the high-growth mode for something like twice as long, This is further evidence that 2008 saw a higher degree of involvement in the election than 2004. Not a surprise, of course, but it's interesting to see the larger societal trends reflected in the dkos numbers.
I've talked a bit about registration rates; those can be easily graphed by looking at the "how many people signed up yesterday?" quantity. For the people who haven't completely repressed their memory of high-school calculus, this is the first derivative of the registration curve:
(nb: this curve has been smoothed somewhat; the actual curve is quite a bit spikier, as can be seen by the next graph below). We can easily pick out the jump in registrations in 2004, see that there was in fact a somewhat smaller surge associated with the midterm elections in 2006. In the summer of 2007, there's the rather pronounced Colbert Bump (the unsmoothed data also shows a sharp peak a couple of months earlier, corresponding to the news coverage of Cindy Sheehan's GBCW post). Then in 2008, we see a steady rise in the rate during primary season, followed by a bit of a lull once the nomination was decided, and all Hell broke loose in the fall. Let's look at the fall in more detail. To see things more clearly, I've turned off the smoothing:
Amazingly enough, it turns out that the period of fastest registration, the time during which the most people were called here, was the Republican National Convention, which ran during the first week of September. Not the DNC, which was the week prior. Not the debates. Not even Election Day (though there is a smaller spike there). I guess Sarah Palin really did fire up the base. Our base, that is.
After the election, as one might expect, there's a rapid falloff in the rate, especially once the holidays arrived. I would expect something of a pickup once Obama is inaugurated, but nowhere near the levels seen during the campaign.
Finally, one bit of minutia, made possible by some very detailed data sets that jotter was kind enough to compile for me. The graphs shown here show how things have varied across the course of the year, from day to day. But, what about within each day? At what time are people most likely to sign up? Well...
This was generated by taking the time of registration for each user-ID of 2008, and then counting up how many registrations fell into a given time-slot (this is a procedure called histogramming). There aren't any real surprises here. There's a lull in the wee hours of the morning, when most of the people in the US are asleep and site readership is dominated by folks in other time zones and people who keep unusual hours. Other than the late-night lull, registration rate is pretty constant throughout the day, at about 7-8 users per hour signing up. This of course is an average; it accounts for both the ~1200 user day of September 8th, and the doldrums of the holidays, when only a handful of people sign up all day.
As mentioned in the intro, 2008 saw lots of ups and downs. I'm sure 2009 will have odd events, both good and bad, of its own, and I'm equally sure that people will show up here to chatter away about them.
-dms