Newly declared Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson had more visitors to his Web site than any of the other candidates according to Hitwise for the week ending September 8, 2007.
Presidential Candidate Thompson Draws Traffic
Fred08.com received 34 percent of U.S. visits among the entire presidential candidate Web sites for that week. Visitors to Fred Thompson’s site were primarily male (65 %) and older (40% being 55 or older). Of all traffic to his site, 10 percent of it came from Tennessee online users where he was Senator.
Other presidential candidates who sites did well were Democratic candidate Barack Obama who’s site received 13 percent of U.S. visits for last week, the second most visits for all candidates. Close behind Obama’s Web site was Republican candidate Ron Paul’s Web site which received 12 percent of visits.
The traffic from social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, increased 205 percent to all the candidate Web sites in August 2007 compared to January 2007. Ron Paul received the most traffic from social networks, followed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
“The online focus of the last presidential election was all about blogs and their effectiveness in communicating with potential voters,” said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise.
“In the 2008 Presidential election, the Internet’s role is changing from a one way communication channel to a two-way conversation enabled by social networking.”
