Farhad Manjoo
In every measure, Obama clobbers Clinton online
Web traffic-monitoring firm Compete runs down the ways Obama trumped Clinton on the Internet in March.
We’ve long known that Barack Obama is the Web’s favorite presidential candidate — now that Ron Paul is gone, the race isn’t even close. But in a blog post today the Web-analysis firm Compete put out the full measure of Obama’s dominance over rival Hillary Clinton.
Look at the table above: In every category, Obama clobbers Clinton.
The first row, FaceTime, is Compete’s composite measurement of online interactions with a candidate — how much time people spend on the candidate’s MySpace and Facebook profiles, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and MeetUp pages. The measurement reflects a “share” of Democrats online — i.e., in March, Obama was the focus of four-fifths of the time that Democrats spent looking at a candidate online.
As a result of his popular speech on race relations, Obama was particularly strong on YouTube. In March, people spent more than half-a-million hours — hours! — on his channel. That’s nearly 60 years of YouTube time! (Clinton’s 59,100 YouTube hours comes to less than 6 years.)
Of course, none of this matters: The superdelegates, not the Internet, will decide the Democratic nominee. But superdelegates must be paying attention to Web traffic data, right?
