Stephen Colbert has mentioned that he’s having trouble getting guests during the writer’s stike. We find this puzzling, given the supposed benefits of the Colbert Bump. Does being on the Colbert Show really provide a bump—a critical leap that vaults a writer, or a politician to superstardom?

We know that Colbert isn’t a big fan of “facts,” and only needs his gut to tell him the Colbert Bump is real. At Juice, we let the data decide what’s real or not, so our apologies to Stephen for not taking his word for it. Intrigued, Juice Analytics set out to find out the truth. We gathered data about Amazon sales rank for 20 authors that appeared on his show in recent months. How did those ranks change in the days immediately before and after the authors’ appearance on the show?

Hmmm, there might be something there but those sales ranks don’t tell us much. Fortunately for Stephen, some “eggheads” have worked out roughly how Amazon sales rank corresponds to actual book sales. We calculated the sales, and normalized the data so that the week prior to appearing on the Colbert Report was equal to 1.0. Here’s a picture.

That looks like a bump, Conan. In fact, being on the Colbert Report increases sales by 10 times on average. That bump doesn't last forever, but, let's face it, what does?

We also wanted to know, what kinds of books are Colbert’s audience going crazy for? After all, Colbert is well known as a rock-solid conservative. He’s tight with the Bush Administration. Even though he debates a few liberal (“pinko”) authors now and then, most of his guests are writers of pop-intellectual studies of the Gladwellian persuasion.

Here are the authors and how we categorized them:

Pinkos: Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, Wesley K. Clark, A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country, Robert Shrum, No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner

‘Publicans: Tom DeLay, No Retreat, No Surrender: One American’s Fight

Pop Essayists: Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel B. Smith, Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination, Michael Gershon, The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine, John J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, Frank J. Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Richard Preston, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Bjorn Lomberg, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, Michael Wallis, The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate

Popular: Stephen Colbert, I Am America (And So Can You!), John Grisham, Playing For Pizza: A Novel, Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles

How much of a bump did each of these groups receive?

It’s a shock! Liberals and high-minded eggheads do better than popular or conservative books. I’m not sure if Colbert knows this, but his audience isn’t who he thinks they are.

Here are all the authors and their normalized sales around the time of their appearance on the Colbert Report.

This post was a collaborative effort of the entire Juice team. Pete Skomoroch concocted the idea, wrote copy, and found the study linking Amazon Sales Rank to actual sales. Zach data mined. David May whipped up elegant, instant visualizations. Sal Uryasev munged data.

One area we’ve been paying particular attention to recently has been the internet traffic for different web site categories. Our friends over at comScore Inc. collect a wealth of information for “measurement of the myriad ways in which the Internet is used and the wide variety of activities that are occurring online.” Nice alliteration, guys.

Using some of the data they’ve allowed us to share with you, we had the bright idea to stuff it into our most favoritest charting type, the treemap. And what’s better than a chart? Answer: an interactive chart with a toggle button.

You’ll need to know a few things to really Juice the data:

• The map is based on unique visitors by site for August 2007 and November 2007.
• Red means a decrease in unique visitors over that three month time period and green means an increase. Black means there is no change.
• You can click on the category headers to zoom into each category. Click on the category header again to zoom back out.
• We provide two views of the data: the default shows just the top ten sites in each category. However, for nearly all categories, sites outside the top 10 account for over 50% of the visitation in the category (the exceptions were Search, Portals, and Auctions where the top players dominate traffic). A checkbox adds “All Others” and gives you a better sense of the size of each category. You can toggle these two views using the checkbox just below the map.
• Due to some confidentiality restrictions that we’re under regarding the raw data, we couldn’t show other metrics that would really make this visualization sing—but I bet if you contacted comScore, they’d be glad to discuss with you.
• A few tech notes. The treemap is adapted from Josh Tynjala’s capable open-source Flex Treemap component. Site images are provided by Amazon.com’s Alexa site thumbnail service.

So, without further ado, take a gander at our latest liberated data:

http://internetmap.juiceanalytics.com/

There’s so much information here, you won’t have any trouble drawing your own conclusions, but here are a few conversation starters:

• Notice that there was a distinct increase in retail web visitors leading up to the holiday seasons.
• Surprise! eBay owns auctions
• Not too good of a showing for those online gambling sites; travel either.
• Sports traffic is up… but not for the MLB.com site. Oh yeah, baseball season is over.

Enjoy.

Disclosure: comScore is a client of Juice Inc.

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