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February 4, 2008

If Web Traffic Was Votes, Obama And Huckabee Would Win Super Tuesday

Duncan Riley

30 comments »

With 24 US States holding presidential primaries tomorrow for Super Tuesday, we took a look at which candidates are getting the most traffic online, and the results (at least with the GOP) were surprising.

For previous TechCrunch coverage, check out the TechCrunch Tech President endorsements here, and full coverage of where each candidate stands on tech issues here.

Democrats: Obama

dem.jpg

No great surprise here and the gap in traffic between Obama and Clinton closely reflects the poll differences between the two coming into Super Tuesday. Obama’s site was the first to offer a full social network for supporters (see our initial review here) and it’s well worth a look even if you’re not interested in politics, or live outside of the United States. Clinton has a polished site, but it doesn’t go nearly as far as Obama’s does….and also currently has a featured picture of Hillary’s back, not a nice look when you’re trying to connect with voters.

Republican: Huckabee

gop1.jpg

This was a surprise result, because with Ron Paul supporters seemingly everywhere online I would have thought Paul would have had the most trafficked website. Perhaps the distributed nature of Paul’s campaign means that supporters aren’t necessarily drawn to his site. Huckabee leads as at the end of December (the last month figures are available) and it cant be due to the site itself, because it’s awful, at least under Firefox on a Mac. Distributed content can be found via small button in the bottom right hand corner, but in terms of stickiness it’s just not there. Romney and McCain’s websites aren’t brilliant, but they at least provide a range of options for supporters. Paul’s campaign site embraces the many different parts of the internet the campaign is using (see our review of Paul’s online strategy here.)

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics » Quick Hits — February 5, 2008

    March 29th, 2008 at 10:25 am

  2. Stats: Obama Still Winning On the Web

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  3. www.teletubis.info » Stats: Obama Still Winning On the Web

    April 11th, 2008 at 9:55 am

  4. ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA « Daily Marauder

    April 11th, 2008 at 2:39 pm

  5. Obama มาแรงบนอินเทอร์เน็ต « i am IA

    April 12th, 2008 at 5:05 am

  6. www.ubraniaroxy.pl » Blog Archive » Stats: Obama Still Winning On the Web

    April 12th, 2008 at 7:17 am

Comments

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  1. Tyler Wright

    February 4th, 2008 at 4:51 pm

    Too bad the press doesn’t give more attention to Huckabee. I think this is a clear sign that youth love him. He’s the best candidate no doubt.

  2. Jeff

    February 4th, 2008 at 4:57 pm

    I think the youth will have a big say in this election

    How do you rate? Check out http://www.yupnup.com

    http://www.yupnup.com

  3. Michael Arrington

    February 4th, 2008 at 4:59 pm

    Huckabee: “People should read the Bible more and blog less.”

    http://www.arktimes.com/blogs/.....v_gov.aspx

    I can’t think of a statement I disagree with more.

  4. Alaska Miller

    February 4th, 2008 at 5:01 pm

    It’s good to know that I should never hire Tyler Wright and Megawatt PR.

  5. Scott

    February 4th, 2008 at 5:02 pm

    This is interesting. The Huckabee results do not seem to be consistent with similar metrics at compete.com and alexa.com, though. They all are no doubt measuring something different.

  6. WebSide Ventures

    February 4th, 2008 at 5:09 pm

    @1 Are you kidding? Huckabee is a religious nut and a poster child of why there is a separation between church and state.

  7. chris

    February 4th, 2008 at 5:09 pm

    Cmon guys, what’s the easiest way to boost traffic to your site? Adwords! I google for “vote” or “election” and I see Mike Huckabee’s ads.

    On the other hand, I go to Ron Paul’s site a few times a day by typing it directly into my browser to see what good news happened today. :)

  8. Zaid

    February 4th, 2008 at 5:30 pm

    Huckabee is powered by Chuck Norris, remember. His only option is to crush all his opponents.

  9. Jon

    February 4th, 2008 at 5:31 pm

    How much of these stats are taken up by slurping by search engines? I wouldn’t put much credence into third party statistical systems… they are a guide but not something to decide even hypothetically if a person should become the president of a nation.

    Jon
    http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories

  10. Andrew

    February 4th, 2008 at 6:38 pm

    Huckabee? What a joke…the guy is batshit insane. He wants to change the constitution so it looks more like the bible. Talk about missing the class on separation of church and state

  11. Andrew

    February 4th, 2008 at 7:55 pm

    “If web Traffic WERE votes”, not “was”. Grammar check!

  12. jh

    February 4th, 2008 at 8:01 pm

    Ignoring the silly comments against Huckabee here. I think what is happening is the Dialing for Huckabee thing is causing that surge. Basically his web sites has a part here volunteers get a list of numbers in the SUper Tuesday states and call away. THey reload it when through with their numbers and get more.

    I think we tried to make 100,000 calls today. I just got in and was not able to do it but that is what is happening

    Oh and GEAUX HUCK

  13. Larry

    February 4th, 2008 at 11:33 pm

    Very surprised to see Huck so high but did he only launch his campaign site at the end of Oct? Ron Paul’s web stats are a given, he has cross appeal even though he has little chance - probably all the campaigns are going to his sites for ideas :)

    What was strange was the dems. There was a spike for Hillary but then the pattern was pretty consistent. Can someone explain that? Was that the stupid song contest?

  14. I Am Not Posting To Spam My Blog

    February 5th, 2008 at 2:28 am

    “People should read the Bible more and blog less.”

    I think the Bible should be put in blog form. Then no-one would read it. Everybody wins!

  15. Russell Heimlich

    February 5th, 2008 at 4:37 am

    If you had to decide the best canddiate based on their backend and frontend web server technologies, Obama would be the winner -> http://www.russellheimlich.com.....andidates/

    Hillary and most of the Republicans use Microsoft’s IIS, while most everyone else serves up their pages with Apache or some other form of an open source operating system.

  16. zedwards

    February 5th, 2008 at 4:56 am

    I am not here to say which candidate is better but to comment on how the web does not necessarily dictate votes. Remember Howard Dean? He was the biggest web sensation and one little incident and it was over. So don’t put too much trust into the web.

  17. Joey M

    February 5th, 2008 at 6:28 am

    With all due respect, can’t ComScore add anything more interesting to the political conversation than stale graphs with incomplete data? Also, I’d like someone to please tell me what use NATIONAL site traffic data is in projecting any meaningful insight into Super Tuesday which is won on a STATE by STATE basis? Please.

    I found Compete.com’s data to be VASTLY more interesting. A recent post even cut the site traffic by the states visitors reside it. How novel. Read and decide for yourself.

    http://blog.compete.com/2008/0.....r-tuesday/

    Oh, and if you’d like to see what John McCain’s traffic was prior to November (I could have sworn he started campaigning last January!) Compete has that too:

    http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv

  18. J M J

    February 5th, 2008 at 9:24 am

    Your report shows no statistical significance based on the scale of traffic. Maybe each week over the past few months, you should have reported Ron Paul as the winner. From the stats I see, it looks like he had a big lead in web traffic. Only dedicated efforts to ignore him have closed the gap.

  19. Grammar Police

    February 5th, 2008 at 9:49 am

    I think you mean “If Web Traffic Were Votes”…

    nice article though!

  20. Robin Seidner

    February 5th, 2008 at 11:03 am

    Ron Paul has infused confusion into the race online for a while. For our most recent predictions using sentiment data from social media, Paul is skewing the race results pretty significantly for today’s contest in Massachusetts because of the amount of blog activity based there. see here: http://blog.collectiveintellec.....s-winners/

  21. Jared White

    February 5th, 2008 at 11:07 am

    FYI, there is no “separation of church and state” in the Constitution. That was a phrase coined by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to a Baptist church where he was reassuring them of the government’s neutral role in promoting denominationalism. The first amendment prohibits congress from establishing a religious institution or movement (or restricting the free exercise thereof!), not from creating policy based on the values derived from religion — or even from holding religious services within government.

    Back on topic — I agree that Huckabee’s Web traffic is probably stemming from the fact that so many of Huckabee’s supporters are engaged in grassroots efforts that are based on resources/news/info supplied from his Web site. He may not have the most impressively-engineered site around, but it’s very timely and very well connected with the grassroots.

  22. Julie

    February 5th, 2008 at 11:31 am

    Grammar check? Are you guys kidding?

    Traffic is singular so “was” is the correct verb, FAIK.

    “Were” modifies plural nouns.

    Anyone else on this LOL?

  23. Dave

    February 5th, 2008 at 12:42 pm

    The way candidates have been using digital media and social networks is fascinating. While the biggest campaigns have been able to attract visitors to their web sites, some candidates have been doing a lot better than others when it’s time to leverage new media: YouTube, MySpace ….
    Check out these articles:

    http://blog.traackr.com

  24. jackmayhofferr

    February 5th, 2008 at 1:43 pm

    Good thing this headline isn’t true

    web traffic is too easily gamed

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