Most of us are mildly annoyed about the dragged-out Democratic presidential nomination process. It's early March and we still don't have a clear nominee, thanks to Ohio and Texas.
But, it occurred to me that the top political news sites (and top newspapers that cover politics for that matter) are probably pretty happy that Hillary and Obama will keep going at it. So, I checked the stats for the main sites that I visit to keep up with election news and, sure enough, all traffic stats are through the roof. Ad revenues must be booming as a consequence.
It's hard to tell from the graph above, but the New Republic online, Politico and Talking Points Memo have all experienced a surge in activity since Super Tuesday (February 5) which, presumably, would not have been quite so strong if the contests were settled on that date. This particular Compete graph measures "attention," which is the total time spent on a domain as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users.
Internet users are paying a lot of attention to political sites and the cliff-hanger on the Democratic side is in all likelihood the cause. As an aside, one great political news aggregation site is Gabe Rivera's Memeorandum, which is always my first stop of the day for political news. It's not on the graph because Memeorandum doesn't (yet) quite have the pull of the bigger name sites. But it should.
I pointed out yesterday that the telcos keep losing a weirdly steady number of landline voice customers each quarter, around 2.3 to 2.6 million traditional customers lost each quarter.
Around half of those defectors are now cable voice customers, and according to the latest Q4 07 tallies, cable's phone business now tops the 13 million mark. As the table below shows, at the end of Q4 07, the top cable companies served 13.3 million voice customers, mostly digital voice (as opposed to the still-in-existence circuit-switched cable voice service).
| Cable Telephony Subscriber Counts | ||
| 4Q06 | 4Q07 | |
| Brighthouse Networks* | 412,050 | 503,852 |
| CableOne | 2,925 | 58,640 |
| Comcast** | 2,519,000 | 4,553,000 |
| Cox*** | 2,023,000 | 2,380,000 |
| Cablevision** | 1,214,000 | 1,592,000 |
| Charter | 445,800 | 959,300 |
| Insight**** | 118,200 | 186,200 |
| Mediacom | 105,000 | 185,000 |
| Time Warner** | 1,860,000 | 2,895,000 |
| Total | 8,699,975 | 13,312,992 |
| Quarterly Adds. | 1,029,320 | 1,184,094 |
| Total Telephony Homes Passed by Group | 97,891,360 | 109,664,048 |
| Subs. % of Telephony Homes Passed | 8.9% | 12.1% |
| *EMDI estimates. | ||
| **Includes sequentially decreasing, and increasingly trivial, amounts of legacy circuit-switched customers. | ||
| ***EMDI estimates for Q307 | ||
| ****Post-split with Comcast. | ||
| Source: Company reports and Emerging Media Analysis estimates. © 2007. | ||
Two-thirds of those customers come from three companies: Comcast, Time Warner and Cox. During the full year 2007, the cable group nearly a combined five million voice customers, with penetration rising from 8.9% to 12.1%.
It's hard to say that cable's growth on the telephony front has slowed down. One of the operators, Insight, just reconfigured itself on 12/31/07 by disbanding a partnership with Comcast and no good quarterly data are available for any quarters but for Q4 06 and Q4 07.
But cable's still got plenty of room to grow. At the end of 2007, cable telephony capable plant passed nearly 110 million U.S. homes, or around 96% of all U.S. homes.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:07 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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