Saturday, July 19, 2008

The CafePress perspective on who's going to win the American Election

Who needs the political pollsters? All you really need to see to work out who will win the next election is the CafePress "what's hot" meter devoted to the American election. This provides graphical presentation of sales data for items related to the various candidates for the American election.

If the 6.5 members of CafePress and their buyers are anything to go by, then Obama has this election won by a landslide already.

Screenshot of the
Cafe Press Meter

courtesy of CafePress

According to CafePress
  • Election merchandise sales account for approximately 20% of CafePress overall revenue (since the election cycle started in November 2007)
  • Sales of Obama products accounts for 56% of cumulative election sales since Nov 2007, while McCain accounts for just 6%!
Do sales trends reflect the rise and fall of candidate popularity? Do current events inspire sales? This graph offers a snapshot of weekly candidate product sales so you can do your own analysis. Jump right in! Select different candidates to view, adjust the start week to see past data, and mouse over the graph to see data points.
CafePress
What's more the CafePressMeter gives you
  • the overall percentage of weekly sales and trends up and down.
  • trends over different time periods. I took a screen shot of the six month trend from January through to July - which you can see above right.
Here are the links - for those who would like to see for themselves.
Normally, you'll never see see anything which is politically related on this blog, but for artists and illustrators with a more commercial bent this is what I would call an enormous marketing opportunity - with a limited timeframe!

[Update and explanatory note] PS. This is not a commercial for Obama. It's a comment on how it's possible to see purchasing trends through online sites used by artists and illustrators to market their work - if the site owners choose to let us see the trends.

5 comments:

  1. Katherine,

    Thanks for the snapshot summary of "what's hot" on Cafe Press. The Cafe Press Meter looks like the Dow Jones Industrial graph. Very Clever!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I looked at the anti designs by number offered. Anti-Democrat designs number 45,900, while anti-Republican are 38,500. Perhaps it is a little skewed because of the addition of Hillary-hate and Bush-hate. Still, there you have those numbers.

    On the subjects anti-Obama, the designs offered number 7,280, while anti-McCain number 3,960.

    Now, I wonder if that changes the perspective on raw number of sales?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good point Casey - I knew that the anti-whoever products would be counted within the overall numbers but hadn't worked out how to find that bit out!

    Like I said - this isn't a commercial for Obama - but the one thing that is very clear is that products relating to the election are selling.

    In an economy on a downturn, anything that's selling is a ray of sunshine for those people whose normal sales figures are being hit in other areas if, as I indicated, and only if you have a commercial bent.

    ReplyDelete
  4. No doubt I myself am skewed, but I think the higher anti-Obama or anti-Democrat numbers can be accounted for by the proclivity of the right wing to define itself in opposition to the left. Anti-ness is their stock in trade. (Though 7 years of GWB has definitely given rise to an anti- mentality among the left!)

    ReplyDelete

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