Gasoline prices have been on the rise for the past three years and 2007 seem to be on a track to beat last year as the highest on record. We looked into our data at Compete to see how high gas prices are affecting consumers.

We compared the monthly people count from websites GasBuddy.com and GasPriceWatch.com against the average gas price price for that month. We saw a general correlation between gas prices and GasBuddy.com—as gas prices increased, visitors to GasBuddy.com also increased. But the thing that really stuck out was the peaks in the visitor counts corresponding to subsequent gas price media releases.

We were able to match these single month peaks to news reports affecting gas prices:

• May 2004: “Gas Price Surpasses $2.00 a Gallon”
• March 2005: “Gas Price at Record $2.109 a Gallon”
• September 2005: “President Bush Warns Against Looting and Gas Price Gouging”
• April 2006: “President Bush Orders Gas Price Probe”
• June 2006: “Gas Price at Record $3.00 a Gallon”

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