Top 10 Political Websites

Interesting data from Hitwise, ranking the top political websites in terms of market share:

Rank     Website                                    Market Share
1.          www.huffingtonpost.com              8.55%
2.          www.realclearpolitics.com           6.26%
3.          www.politico.com                       4.9%
4.          www.barackobama.com             4.53%
5.          elections.foxnews.com               4.24%
6.          www.freerepublic.com                3.44%
7.          politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com      3.33%
8.          www.dailykos.com                    3.24%
9.          www.johnmccain.com               2.23%
10.        www.townhall.com                    1.92%

There are a few things that strike me about this list:

# 1. Huffington Post (left-leaning) has more than twice the market-share of Fox News (right leaning), just as Barack Obama's website has more than twice the market share of John McCain's. In fact, let's lump right-leaning, left-leaning, and neutral sites and see how market share shakes out:

• Left leaning (Huff Po, Politico, Barack Obama, and Daily Kos) = 21.22% market share combined
• Right-leaning ((Fox, Free Republic, John McCain, and Town Hall) = 12.01% market share combined
• Neutral sites (Forbes' Real Clear Politics and CNN's Political Ticker) = 9.59% market share combined

It's a well-known fact that the population of internet users skews younger than the population at large, as does the Democratic party. So is this huge disparity attributable just to the fact that there are more Democrats than Republicans turning to the internet for info?

The right wing has totally dominated the radio space, but these stats make me think that the left wing is starting to dominate the online space. The future is online, not radio, and so Rove and company are going to have to try and figure out how to compete better online.

#2. Obama beats McCain 2:1. Other studies have shown that Obama takes better advantage of the web channel than McCain, but in an era of close elections, can one party afford to surrender so much market share in such a critical channel? And what can they do about it at this late date?

#3. Only two of the top 10 sites are affiliated with major traditional media outlets: CNN's Political Ticker and Real Clear Politics, which is owned by Forbes. (full disclosure: Forbes is a client of ours, and we are running satisfaction surveys on RealClearPolitics). Why are none of the other networks or major national print media outlets on this list? I think it goes back to what we've seen in the annual ACSI ratings of news and information sites like ABCNews.com, USAToday.com, MSNBC.com, and NYTimes.com. For many years in a row now, none of these sites have been able to significantly differentiate themselves from one another.

In addition the domination by sites with a clearly partisan voice makes me think that people are looking to political websites with a viewpoint they already hold, rather than a neutral one.

#4. Hitwise also has some interesting data on what political issue search terms led people to each candidate's website. For McCain, the top search terms leading to his website were: Healthcare, Environment/Global Warming, Oil Prices, Education, Immigration, in that order. For Obama, the top search terms leading to his website were: Abortion, Education, Environment/Global Warming, Healthcare, and Immigration.

However, the majority of people went to Obama's site looking for biographical info, vs. going to McCain's site to get his position on the issues.

This behavioral data gives us some interesting peeks into the role the internet is playing during these campaigns. But I don't see anyone that is too comfortable making predictions based on this data.

Comments

[Mike]

Funny, how is it that I've never even seen the top website: Huffington Post?? Will check it out now! I'm very familiar with the rest. I mainly use a site that links to political sites... www.repolitical.com. It links to the top political news of day. Thanks for new site!

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