Tuesday, October 29, 2013

I wish I could launch a site that got 14.6 million visits in its first weeks on the market


David Blumenthal, the President of the Commonwealth Fund, said in his blog last week, that HealthCare.gov received 14.6 million visits by October 11.  

Blumenthal predicted that millions of people will be enrolled before President Obama's term is over.  "...the 15 states that are running their own marketplaces, some with considerable success, will probably have enrolled millions of previously uninsured Americans in Medicaid or private health insurance plans. State-run marketplaces account for half of the nearly 500,000 individuals who have already completed applications. We learned last week that Oregon has already cut the number of its uninsured by 10 percent. In the first five days, California created over 43,000 accounts and recorded nearly 1 million website visits. New York had received 80,000 applications by October 11. Kentucky had created 29,350 accounts by October 10."


     I say to myself..." I should be the developer of such a failure of a website!" 

Don't you think it's worth reconsidering this unmitigated "failure to launch",  the Republic-labeled societal disaster perhaps only rivaled by Johnson's creation of a safety net for all Americans, or "Obama's Iraq" (never was liking Tweets? read AnaMarieCox's (The Guardian) counter to the stupid twitter guy).  

Open enrollment and Healthcare.gov, even in its tortured debut, has gotten more people to seek out health insurance than CGI or CMS every imagined.  And how do those two behemoths explain their utter lack of imagination, their blindness – in not appreciating, anticipating the state of desperation and desire so many people live with.  (You might find Paul Waldman's piece "Healthcare.gov2: The Contractors Search for More Money" (10/28/13) on The American Prospect insightful about how the federal contracting process was exceptionally ill-suited for the ACA website job.

     14.6 million hits after only 10 days live, and with countless thousands trying but not succeeding in getting through to enroll.  

     It got me to thinking of what that number feels like on the grid.  So here is my homegrown site hit statistics  (my “sources” google and quantcast J ) Note these are international stats.


Google                      196 million per month
Youtube                    181 million per month           
Amazon                     80 million per month 
Ebay                          65+ million per month
Yelp                           65+ million per month
Wikipedia                   52 million per month
Weather.com             29 million per month
Craigslist                   40.8 million per month
Walmart                     24 million per month
Target                       13.5 million per month
Bizrate                      12 million per month
Fandango                 10 million per month
Fedex                       10 million per month
Tripadvisor                 9  million per month
Jcpenny                      8 million per month
Verizon                       5 million per month
Zappos                       4.4 million per month
Simplyrecipes             7 million per month
Staples                       6 million per month
Costco                        5 million per month
NPR                            4.5 million per month
Angie’s list                  4 million per month
Travelzoo                   3.5 million per month
Toysrus                      3 million per month
CDC                           3 million per month
VA                              2.6 million per month
Rush Limbaugh         1.5 million per month

14 million people and rising.  I should only be that lucky. 




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