CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
See Full Big Line
(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
90%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) Brittany Pettersen
85%↑
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
See Full Big Line
DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
January 19, 2015 10:44 AM UTC
50 Comments
I always suspected their social media numbers were bogus. I think I can prove it's true for Twitter, too: if you click their Tweet button, the tweet it gives you includes @copeakpolitics. It should be easy therefore to see the 80 tweets they claim exist for the post in the image above, but I can't find them.
I don't think Astroturf does this justice. I doubt it's illegal but it's fraudulent as hell.
A “peek” in to how the world of dynamic scoring works?
"Dynamic scoring!" We so should have used that.
For those that haven't been following the dynamic scoring issue …
Republicans in Congress Just Made it Easier to Cut Taxes
I prefer to count "source" button clicks . . .
The number returned by the graph.facebook.com API call is just not supposed to be the same number as the number next to the Facebook Like button. The API call returns just the number of shares, but the number next to the Like button is shares + likes + comments + some others. See the Facebook documentation.
Except this isn't the Like button, it's the Share button. Nice try.
The Facebook Like button and Share buttons report the same number. See the documentation here as well.
I figured it out, see my comment below.
Also, this is the same number returned by the API in either case, so either way they are inflating it.
All you've done is provide an additional way that the numbers may be going up, and provided no evidence at all to decide how much the two possibilities are affecting the number. Note that it's simply a fact that the Share/Like buttons aren't reporting what they seem to be reporting, and that's as documented by Facebook.
See below.
I think I figured out how they are faking these numbers.
http://support.sharethis.com/customer/portal/questions/914415-counter-increments-without-really-sharing
Peak Politics uses the ShareThis sharing plugin, which WOULD use the Facebook API but it has its own counter (see above). But if you sit in front of your 'puter and click their Share button over and over again it runs up the ShareThis counter even though the share isn't really happening.
If it was just once in awhile, or at least not the vast majority of their counts as it appears to be, it could be dismissed as an accident. But there's NO WAY it's an accident when Facebook says the real number of shares is a tiny fraction.
NOTE I am not the person who gave this to Pols. But Peak Politics is totally fucking nailed if you ask me.
Also, go look at Peak Politics' Facebook page. They don't have shit for likes, shares or comments. These fuckers are caught red handed. I'm amazed it took this long for somebody to figure this out, it's completely obvious.
They're using ShareThis with the URLs of their blog pages, and not referencing their Facebook page. So there's no reason at all to expect matching counts on their Facebook page. It just means that most people are interacting with their site through the blog content, and not through Facebook. So, still no evidence at all of anything nefarious.
Wow this really makes ShareThis a bullshit tool, Mr. Bullshit.
That depends. It's a convenient solution for WordPress sites like ours, and we also use the ShareThis plugin. We do not utilize the counter function, not because we knew it was inaccurate but because it cluttered the layout of our blog when we tried it.
We certainly won't use their counter now that we know it is so easily abused. The tech support message quoted above is exactly how the issue was represented to us by our source for this story, and settles the question in our minds.
Though, ShareThis have abuse filters which run at the end of the day, to remove multiple clicks received from the same machine. It's not so easy to hypothetically run up the numbers as it might seem.
So, umm, you're saying that you have to gather your team's Pc's in a circle, umm, when you are um, giving each other a helping hand?
>30% of ColoradoPols traffic comes from India.
Country
Percent of Visitors
Rank in Country
58.9%
123,500
32.5%
81,194
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/coloradopols.com
Are they really interested in Colorado Politics in India or is Pols paying for traffic to goose its numbers?
If you are going to complain about someone cooking the traffic books, it seems an explanation is in order. Paid links, perhaps?
Nobody gave you permission to speak, ACHole, so shut the fuck up and go abuse a Republican.
dusty…..oh nevermind. He doesn't need permission – none of us do. I have the "style" button on my task bar, can shut him out at will, but he's been a bit more interesting lately, so I'll leave it open for now. Pols seems to have his a nerve, though, for a CPP writer like AC, and I'm enjoying that.
As I understand it, a lot of cell phone and internet traffic is routed through servers which may be in India. So if folks are accessing through a mobile device Plenty of people are more knowledgeable about this than myself,
0% of the traffic from CPP comes from India. Nice try.
Whatever. I actually like when people outside the US read my stuff. I track hits with bitly. Apparently, I have some fans in the UK and China. It doesn't make me feel un-American or anything. I don't understand enough about the India server thing to even comment on it anymore, so I won't.
coloradopols facebook page sucks. It was last updated 2 years ago or so. It's apparently not a priority. They should either keep it updated, (I offered to help), or take it down.
So, hard to compare apples to oranges on FB likes and shares, although my own social network shares pols articles frequently.
MJ, They don't read your stiff. They create bogus writings that mention ColoradoPols and have a link back to the site. A few clicks on a few links makes the supercomputer in the sky think people are actually reading this in India.
If people were interested about Colorado politics in India and were actually reading about it you would expect similar traffic on CPP. They have zero traffic from India. It is just ColoradoPols doing the same kind of stuff it is calling out CPP for doing.
You just admitted below that you are a professional liar…
why don't you just stfu and go away? No one cares what a liar thinks…
Ah well, I'll stick with my bitly stats for info on who's reading my posts and clicking bitly links. They seem pretty accurate. I do know that it's time I stopped reading your "stuff".
Other than knee-jerk defense of any idiotic thing Ken Buck does or says, and anything CPP or Redstate ever posts, you have little to contribute, and I can feel brain cells dying when I get trappped in your snark battles.
Thanks for reminding me why Pcat created the "NoPolsTrolls" style.
Alexa estimates internet traffic based only users who have installed the Alexa toolbar. The toolbar seems to be relatively very popular in (e.g.) India, and that dramatically throws off the numbers. For example, Alexa says that 2.3% of denverpost.com's traffic comes from India, and only 1.5% from Canada! That's not believable. I'd guess that the India numbers are off by a factor of 1000.
Paccer, What it suggests is Pols buys SEO services from India and has links built there in order to artificially pump up its numbers. I do the same thing on behalf of a corporate web site. So Pols buys traffic from India and CPP tries to pump up its numbers from facebook. Pardon the lack of outrage.
Still nothing to add to Brownback discussion, I see. Don't blame you. Completely agree you should be sticking with this instead.
So you are a professional liar, I see. That'll boost the ol' credibility numbers….
paccers' explanation makes a lot more sense than yours…BTW.
We don't have an explanation for what Alexa shows about "traffic from India," and we are getting our hosting provider on the case to figure it out. Our best guess is that this is related to the spam we have to clear off the site most mornings, but we'll wait to hear from our providers to be sure. If there is this much clearly illegitimate traffic on our server, we want it stopped since our servers have trouble keeping up with the load as it is.
And of course, we're not publicly displaying "traffic from India" to pretend we have relevance in Colorado. Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention, but as some kind of defense for what Peak Politics has been doing with their publicly displayed share stats…not so much. Sorry.
Pols, The answer likely lies in who does your SEO and link building.
I see you haven't been too busy to spend lots of time on this thread. But still nothing at all to say on the Brownback thread. Gee…. could it be because the Borg's got nothing?
Considering how few resources the Guvs have to spend on fixing simple things like bullet list displays and the editor, I'm guessing that SEO isn't high on their list. But thanks for playing.
So you're saying that not even spammers can find a good reason to visit PeakGobbletyGook???? . . .
. . . Jesus, how sucky can a site get??!!??
If the number of calls I get from Gary and Kevin and Jason with Indian accents telling me I have a Windows problem that needs fixing is any indication, sounds like a likely theory. The record is three of those the other morning in an hour and a half. Probably accounted for more than half of the landline calls I got that day.
All blogs are shameless self promoters. This is the pot calling the kettle black, nothing more.
I remember when Colorado Pols was the only blog in town. I guess they're upset that they have competition.
When was that? In what mythical era was Colpols the ONLY blog in town?
Hush! This is good for our ego.
Moddy…you are such a cartoon. Piss Ant should post you….
They can't help it. They're Republicans.
This is why I rarely read the comments here anymore (this one peaked my interest because of the SEO angle):
Every successful (and most unsuccessful) websites does everything it can to boost its numbers, traffic, and SEO. Everything listed above is SOP, although the links from India are probably hurting Pol's SEO.
Keep in mind that when your worldview is this hateful, it degrades your own happiness.
Thanks for the evaluation… and the advice…Dave.
You're saying it's normal for blogs to click on the share buttons a hundreds times to make it look like they have more traffic?
You web masters are a devious lot then, Dave.
Unlike the news media with "If it bleeds, it leads"? Or political candidates who tell us they'll put our needs before those of the 0.01%?
We've been using the same 2 outlets to track our statistics for about 8 years now, so we can be confident in our traffic figures. In 2014, 97.08% of Colorado Pols traffic came from within the United States.
We don't use Alexa, and they don't have access to Colorado Pols — they are just making guesses about our traffic sources.
That's quite possible. If you don't have their Javascript in your pages then all they can use is info from people with their toolbar (a very small number) and try to find comparable websites (a big guess).