Professor Apex: Merging Web Traffic

Some fans are skeptical of the open wheel merger hype. Recently I read a forum post that suggested that increased interest only exists in the minds of fans and biased sports writers. Refusing to drink Tony's Kool-Aid, they refute the idea that attendance is up and ratings are high.

The whole rating and attendance debate is well covered in the thousands of articles and forum posts already on the web. I would like to introduce another piece of evidence your honor. I believe that web traffic is an excellent indicator of interest levels.

To begin with, I queried the "all knowing" Google. They have made available an excellent tool called Google Trends which provides search trend data. In order to steer clear of the IndyCar vs CCWS issue, I used a search term that hopefully covers both of them. I chose the term "Open Wheel". The data provided for this year is limited to the beginning of July, so I sampled data between January and July of each year. Also, I limited search traffic to the United States. After performing some Microsoft Excel voodoo, I came up with the following results.

Year - Average Data Volume
2005 - 0.275652
2006 - 1.083478
2007 - 1.668182
2008 - 2.254545

The measurement Google uses is scaled. So a 1.0 value is considered average within the time period measured. The first thing I noticed is the drastic jump in 2006. I believe this can be explained by how Google handles small amounts of traffic. If traffic falls below a certain threshold, it is not recorded. I am theorizing that the search term was near the threshold, and some months were not included. Based on this information it appears that the term has been steadily rising at an even pace since 2005. Sadly they do not have data available from before 2005.

This hardly proves or disproves any kind of giant increase due the the merger. But I did find one other interesting item. Google also includes a graph which charts the number of related news items it has crawled. This seems to have increased dramatically:



It seems that news articles related to open wheel in the US jumped significantly around the time of the merger. This is probably no surprise to anyone but I found it interesting nonetheless.

By comparison, here are the result for "Stock Car".

Year - Average Data Volume
2005 - 1.073636
2006 - 1.031364
2007 - 0.927143
2008 - 0.948571

The term "Nascar" shows similar results. Initially I looked this up to see if racing related traffic in general showed an increase, and it appears that these two terms have decreased. Interesting...

Finally, I pulled the Alexa trends for the year. Alexa is a piece of software that tracks web activity. I ran a comparison between Nascar.com and IndyCar.com. Here is what I found.

This is overall page views. Nascar has the upper hand no doubt. You can see that there is a small increase on IndyCar.com though.



This is Alexa's ranking value. Rank is determined by analyzing both the page view traffic and visitor data. As you can see, the site has increased dramatically in this area.



Thus ends my lecture. I think open wheel in the US is neither drifting into oblivion, nor is it the hottest thing since Rick James. I leave you to your own conclusions.