Political Web: A Promise Not Yet Fulfilled

In 2007, YouTube hosted two Presidential debates. The most popular video from the Republican debates has been viewed 295,559 times. Another 19.5 million views and it'll get close to the popularity of Miss Teen South Carolina's infamous blunder. Yes, politics are on the Web and, yes, you can find Hilary Clinton and Tom Tancredo on Facebook and MySpace. But so far, Politics 2.0 is more hype than substance. Next year, candidates will spend little money on online advertising, instead using the Internet only for three things: grassroots organizing, fund-raising, and games of "gotcha." Candidates aren't concerned about popularity on the Internet, because so far, there seems to be little evidence that it matters. Take Ron Paul for an example. Web analytics company Compete puts November unique visitors to the Paul campaign's homepage at ronpaul2008.com at 496,906 people. The next closest, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's mikehuckabee.com, saw only 270,349 unique visitors during the month. One-time Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney totaled 115,819; former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, 108,120. Also according to Compete, Ron Paul groups represented 87 percent of total time spent organizing any political activities on Meetup.com.
Source: Compete, Inc. Yet according to the latest poll from NBC and the Wall Street Journal (available in PDF format), only 4 percent of Republicans would nominate Paul to run for the party. By comparison, Giuliani comes in at 20 percent and Huckabee at 17 percent. Evidently, Internet popularity does not yet translate into real-world popularity. The candidates know it, too. That's why they're keeping their ad money off the Internet and spending it on TV, according to Campaign Media Analysis Group, a division of TNS Media Intelligence. Though spending on campaign advertising should reach $3 billion in 2008, the online portion "will amount to little more than a rounding error when put next to the money spent on television," advertising analyst Evan Tracey told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. "If any business had to run on a cycle where you could only get your customers once every other year, and you had one day when they had to pick between your brand and somebody else's and whichever brand had 51 percent of the market won, you would want to have a medium that is best situated to essentially drive up the volume and get ... customers to notice you," Tracey said. "That has always been television." Next page: So will candidates be using the Internet at all in 2008?