Everyone’s eyes have been closely watching what’s been happening south of the border lately. You’ve got one heck of a presidential race going on and, dang, what’s that other thing?… Oh ya! That 700 billion dollar bailout which potentially threatens the entire world’s economy. Whether you think the bailout is a good or bad idea, it’s interesting to see how the situation is playing out on the internet.
The recent market turmoil has undoubtedly spiked traffic on the web. Suddenly the term “bailout” is prominently back in our vocabulary. It used to be that when you heard someone saying “bail-out” it was followed by the words “of jail”. Arguably the conversation could still have been about Wall Street but these days it’s followed by “Seven Hundred Billion Dollars” and conjures thoughts of fiscal irresponsibility and lost savings.
Using <a href=”http://www.Google.com/trends” target=”_blank”>www.Google.com/trends</a> we can see that the volume of searches for “bailout” exploded over the past 30 days. Although exact numbers aren’t easily available graphs on the site show an incredible leap over the previous quantity of searches in the past few years. If we look at Canadians searching out the term, residents in BC were the most interested followed by those in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta.
Blogs will have also noticed increased number of visitors especially those using the terms “Wall Street” and “bailout”. According to the Nielsen Online – which measures and analyzes online audiences – bloggers worldwide wrote the keywords “Wall Street” approximately 80 percent more times in the final days of September. On September 29th, 2 percent of all blogs mentioned the word “bailout”. 2 percent may not sound like a lot but consider for a moment that some estimates indicate there are over 110 million blogs on the net. Visitors also flowed to brokerage and trading websites during this period. Sites such as Fidelity.com and Ameritrade found unique visitor numbers expanding by about 30 percent. Merrill Lynch traffic jumped nearly 128 percent during the final week. Some other similar websites had increases of over 200 percent. According to Nielsen these increases signal that consumers are “voicing opinions about the financial crisis, both on- and offline”.
The dramatic increase in internet traffic was also felt by US Congress members. Servers which hosted the House of Representatives website (www.house.gov) crashed for a short period of time as millions of people sent angry emails and tried to download documents which outlined details on the bailout. The website’s traffic was reportedly higher than that of the day when then final 9/11 commission report was released.
It’s hard to guess what the outcome of all this might be. If you follow the news and find yourself saying “I told you that was going to happen”, you might like hubdub.com. The site is essentially a game which lets you bet and earn “hubdub dollars” by predicting the outcome of real running news topics. Questions include “How many Canadian provinces will record deaths in the Listeriosis outbreak before Oct 11/08?” and “How will the NASDAQ do in October?” Most people voting on the later question predict a dip of 6% to less than 10%. If gambling on Wall Street and Bay Street has you tired, the site is a fun place to turn to. It’s surprisingly addicting and much better than losing your real money.
