Polls may show the presidential race is extremely tight, but the contest between the candidates’ online operations is no contest at all, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism: Obama is winning there in a landslide, although the McCain camp is showing signs of narrowing the gap as of late.
From a story on LiveScience:
Obama’s Web site makes it much easier for supporters to take action, while the McCain site offers only the more basic grassroots functions.
As of Sept. 9, Obama boasted 510,799 MySpace friends, compared with McCain’s 87,652 such friends. That gives Obama a more than 5-to-1 lead in number of friends, down from a 7-to-1 advantage in August. Obama also showed a lead on Facebook with 1,726,453 supporters to McCain’s 309,591.
Obama’s Web site has twice as many videos posted to his official YouTube channel and far more YouTube channel subscribers, by an 11-to-1 margin.
However, when it comes to generating online buzz — as measured by Google Trends — neither Obama nor McCain these days can hold a candle to the latter’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She’s off the charts.
