Have Peak Oil Web Sites Peaked?
The Oil Drum (www.theoildrum.com) is an intriguing blog site featuring an active community debating peak oil's causes and consequences. As an empiricist, I was interested in what is the correlation between the price of gasoline and the web traffic that this site generates. Do you see a September 2005 peak in the picture below? This picture shows the site count for the Oil Drum by month in 2005.
In all honesty, this web site generates tremendous traffic. As a minor league blogger, I am envious. If I am right that web traffic responds to real prices then this has interesting implications for "Real Business Cycle" effects of blog pages. How much do shocks such as terrorist attacks increase web hits to certain pages while other shocks such as oil price shocks raise interest in "peak oilers"?
As oil prices have fallen is the "Oil Drum" really less interesting than it used to be? The market seems to be saying "yes". What a fickle market! Doesn't the curve below look like a Hubbert's Peak?
In all honesty, this web site generates tremendous traffic. As a minor league blogger, I am envious. If I am right that web traffic responds to real prices then this has interesting implications for "Real Business Cycle" effects of blog pages. How much do shocks such as terrorist attacks increase web hits to certain pages while other shocks such as oil price shocks raise interest in "peak oilers"?
As oil prices have fallen is the "Oil Drum" really less interesting than it used to be? The market seems to be saying "yes". What a fickle market! Doesn't the curve below look like a Hubbert's Peak?
posted by Matthew E. Kahn at 7:58 PM
4 Comments:
Without the Katrina coverage, TOD would probably have started slow like most other blogs.
The problem is not that they are declining, it is that they started too strong and that it couldn't last.
I think you're right that gas prices have something to do with interest in our blog.
But what you've presented here is only part of the hits data (as that's just from the new site the old site started in April).
Stuart just put up figures from the old site and the new site that makes the trend a little flatter, but it is still present...and you raise a good point.
Also, the September and October spikes are primarily due to the "hurricanes and their impacts" coverage we did that got picked up by a lot of folks. We're still averaging over 4k/day, but it's nothing like it was in September.
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Let's try that again. Here's a link to Stuart's post.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/12/2/16561/8672
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