Luis F. Alvarez-Leon, Johannes Paßmann, Johan Söderberg

MICROFINANCING THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT

OBJECTIVE

Track the different types of financial transactions

present in websites related to a particular issue.

We chose Occupy Wall Street as a movement and set

out to track the different payment systems its related

websites use to collect funds.

Graph by Justin Elliott

METHODOLOGY

1. 117 top sites according to Blekko for the word ”OWS”

2. Source Code Search for the string ”https://”, which indicates a secure financial transaction on the site.

3. After removing links pointing to Twitter, Facebook etc., we got 69 sites with ”https://” leading to financial transactions.

4. On the remaining pages, we found the following payment services...

PAYPAL

WEPAY

NETWORK FOR GOOD

LOCAL

OTHER

15

4

1

5

1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015

10

5

10

-5

-10

Microfinancing Occupy!

PAYPAL

NETWORK FOR GOOD

WEPAY

WIKILEAKS

OCCUPY

FINDINGS

1.WePay is the single dominant payment system used by OWS-related websites.

2. Paypal is the second, but overshadowed by the aggregate of others.

3. Low use of PayPal could be due to OWS's protest vs. PayPal and banks. Hence: WePay as alternative payment.

4.Top site, by far was www.occupywallst.org with more

than a million visits at its peak in Oct 2011.

Four others also had high traffic, but all much lower

(in the range of 85,000 to about 300,000 visits at their peak

also in Oct 2011).

5. Out of the top 5 sites by traffic, only www.occupywallst.org

(the top site) and have any donation buttons in their source

code.

We infer that the top sites in terms of traffic within the OWS

movement are for information and diffusion purposes mainly.

Fund collection presumably concentrated in local branches

(lower traffic sites).

This is consistent with the decentralized nature we have

observed in the formation of OWS and its different offspring.

Luis F. Alvarez-Leon, Johannes Paßmann, Johan Söderberg

Summer School 2012Digital MethodsAmsterdam