Hi All: I am writing a book on the Alt-Right movement in the US. I am looking at many aspects of the movement including the size and nature of the audience for its websites. I’ve found that all Hard Core Alt-Right websites combined got on average about 3 million visits a month and grew by about 17.7 percent over the last six months. But an obvious question is: What percentage of those visits are by people who are truly committed to Alt-Right ideology, and what percentage are by people who are merely curious or even opposed to Alt-Rightism? I have access to web traffic data from the provider SimilarWeb and can find out for a given time period what websites were visited immediately before, during, and immediately after a visit to a particular “target” site. For example, regarding the Hard Core Alt-Right site amren.com, I know that: ►The site most often visited immediately before the visit to amren.com was conservative-headlines.com; ►The site visitors most often had open during their visit to amren.com was thepoliticalcesspool.com; ►The site most often visited immediately after a visit to amren.com was dailykenn.blogspot.com. My question is what, if anything, can I infer about the political sympathies of a visitor to an Alt-Right site based on knowledge such as the above about his web-surfing history? Suppose “a lot” (5 percent, 15 percent, 50 percent?) of visits to an Alt-Right site are made by curiosity seekers or people doing opposition research. Wouldn’t we then see that “a lot” of the sites visited before, during, and after the visit to the target site were not Alt-Right sites? Conversely, if the overwhelming majority of visits to an Alt-Right site are part of a pattern of visits to such sites, wouldn’t that imply most of the visits were made by Alt-Right sympathizers? Or maybe not? Have any of you out there dealt with problems similar to this one? Do you know of any literature on such issues? Thanks for any suggestions you can make. Cheers, Thomas J. Main Professor Marxe School of Public and International Affairs Baruch College, City University of New York One Bernard Baruch Way Box D-0901 New York, NY 10010-5585 T: 646-660-6719 F: 646-660-6701 Office: 135 East 22nd Street, Room 912 thomas.main@baruch.cuny.edu<mailto:thomas.main@baruch.cuny.edu> Web Site: http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/spa/faculty-and-staff/full-time-faculty/thomas-ma...