Intellectual Property Law

Dragged-Out Nomination No Doubt Cheers Political Sites

By Cynthia Brumfield

Most of us are mildly annoyed about the dragged-out Democratic presidential nomination process. It's early March and we still don't have a clear nominee, thanks to Ohio and Texas.

But, it occurred to me that the top political news sites (and top newspapers that cover politics for that matter) are probably pretty happy that Hillary and Obama will keep going at it. So, I checked the stats for the main sites that I visit to keep up with election news and, sure enough, all traffic stats are through the roof. Ad revenues must be booming as a consequence.

It's hard to tell from the graph above, but the New Republic online, Politico and Talking Points Memo have all experienced a surge in activity since Super Tuesday (February 5) which, presumably, would not have been quite so strong if the contests were settled on that date. This particular Compete graph measures "attention," which is the total time spent on a domain as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users.

Internet users are paying a lot of attention to political sites and the cliff-hanger on the Democratic side is in all likelihood the cause. As an aside, one great political news aggregation site is Gabe Rivera's Memeorandum, which is always my first stop of the day for political news. It's not on the graph because Memeorandum doesn't (yet) quite have the pull of the bigger name sites. But it should.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on March 05, 2008 (boomark / email).