Ron
Paul: Still President Of The Web Dan Frommer|Dec.
19, 2007, 4:31 PM
Ron
Paul has no practical chance of winning the Republican nomination
for president, but his sustained Web caché is remarkable.
Last time we checked in with Paul's Internet popularity, he
was (and still is) the top Republican candidate in Personal
Democracy Forum's TechPresident channel, which measures stuff
like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube popularity.
Today, another set of metrics from Web analytics firm Compete,
whose "Candidate FaceTime" index measures the amount
of time voters spend on candidates' Web sites, plus their
related profiles on major social networks, Flickr, and New
York's Meetup.com.
In November, Compete says voters spent 252,000 hours looking
at Ron Paul's pages, up 50% month-over-month and almost twice
as much attention as his next rival, up-and-comer Mike Huckabee.
Paul commanded 53% of the total "FaceTime" spent
on Republican candidates, and 87% of the attention to all
candidates from both parties on Meetup.com.
The closest "FaceTime" Democrat, meanwhile, was
Barack Obama: voters spent about 91,000 hours looking him
up online in November.
So, what gives? In our opinion, it's mostly demographics:
Paul is controversial, outspoken, and amusing, and those sorts
of people do well on the Web, politicians or not. He may lack
mainstream, commercial campaign backers, but his type of grassroots
cause has always flourished on the Web -- and we don't see
that stopping any time soon.