The US Government Online: Eighty-One Million People With Nothing To Do

Research firm comScore did the survey about which sites people visit. One piece of data that stands out is that young people don’t visit government sites. These are individuals who spend a disproportionate part of their lives online, but they don’t spend it conducting research about their senators or congressmen. People ages 12 to 24 have an index of 75 for visiting the federal government online. All other age groups have an index of over 100.

Some of the information from the survey is not particularly surprising. The Cars.gov site which keeps data on the “cash for clunkers” operation received more than two million unique visitors in July. The project is now virtually forgotten, except for car dealers waiting to get overdue government rebate checks. The cars.gov site traffic should be close to zero by September.

Traffic to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention site, CDC.gov was up 19% over July of last year to over 2.6 million unique visitors. The swine flu is predicted to infect as many as two billion people worldwide in the next two years, and the epidemic may hit the US in earnest in October. The CDC website won’t be able to handle the millions of visitors it will get by then. The government had better start adding server capacity now.

The largest percentage increase in traffic to one of the major government sites is the 208% increase in unique visitors to Fueleconomy.gov, pushing the number to two million last month. Gas prices are not high, particularly compared to a year ago, so the statistic does not make any sense. Maybe people believe that the drop in gas prices is temporary. No wonder sales of hybrid vehicles are up.

Historians and sociologists are worried that Americans are not as engaged with the government as they used to be. There has been a fear that people have become jaded and apathetic over the last several years, and feel powerless now that the economy has fallen apart. Quite the opposite is true, if online behavior is an indication. Unique visits to Whitehouse.gov are up 88% compared to July 2008 and unique visits to House.gov and Senate.gov are up about the same amount. That does not say anything about whether citizens like what is going on at of the federal level of the government, but it would be nearly impossible to make a case that they are not interested.

Only one government website had a precipitous drop-off in traffic and that was Irs.gov. Visits were down 52% in July compared with last year. That really is not a surprise. People do not have income to pay taxes on, so the site doesn’t have much utility. There will be reason to hope that a rapid recovery of the economy is underway when Irs.gov starts to get the kind of traffic that The White House website does.

Douglas A. McIntyre