Noynoy Aquino Leading the Race

By Rico, 9:09 am Wed Nov 11 2009 - Analysis, Featured - What Do You Think?

Looks like the son of Ninoy and Cory Aquino is leading the race online, at least in terms of visibility. This is according to a report compiled by a volunteer working for Noynoy’s camp, from publicly-available sources.

The data, publicly available through Compete and Google Insights, tries to compare the online presence of the following presumed presidential candidates:

• Noynoy Aquino
• Manny Villar
• Chiz Escudero
• Erap Estrada
• Gibo Teodoro

Clearly, from the Google Insight data, Noynoy’s presence on the web is consistently growing; both Chiz and Erap have experienced spikes corresponding to announcements (or non-announcements) of their respective candidacies. Villar remains a consistent second, while Gibo places last. The current “interest” numbers as reported by Google, which attempts to estimate how much people are using the search engine to find information about the candidates, are:

• Noynoy – 40
• Villar- 29
• Erap- 23
• Chiz- 18
• Gibo- 0

These figures are current as of yesterday; definitely they will change over time.
The data from Compete.com, which attempts to estimate how many people visit the candidates’ official websites, is less comprehensive. The volunteer reports that “Gibo.ph still doesn’t get enough [visits] for compete.com to take a statistical sample”, and Erap currently has no official website to track. According to the analytics tool, the official sites of the other candidates have dropped sharply from August highs, though the Noynoy volunteer assumes “[Noynoy's] stats will change when the election season formally starts”—an assumption I think applies to all front-running candidates. The estimates for “unique visitors” for Noynoy, Chiz, and Villar for September 2009 are:

• Noynoy – 2117
• Chiz – 374
• Villar – 17

Are the above figures definite? Hardly. Only 22% of Filipinos are online (as of last March), meaning regular pinoy surfers are still a minority of the Philippine population. It definitely doesn’t measure whatever appeal Erap has offline, as the volunteer reports:

Erap’s figures are going to be a bit tough to analyze. His web presence is at most middling, with most of his online hits coming from news sources. What worries me is that a large part of his support base aren’t really the type to be active online. There might be something there that we are not seeing, and this deserves some due diligence.

However, the volunteer also surmises that Noynoy’s apparent visibility has scared “the other candidates enough for them to break out their demolition teams this early in the game.” Whether or not that’s true, it’s clear that it’s still quite difficult—if not impossible—to determine a candidate’s “buzz” only from online sources, especially when the tools used tend to work better when estimating web traffic in the US, not in the Philippines.

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