Compete is a web analytics company that estimates site traffic using its member base of over 2 million users. Recently, it introduced Candidate Facetime – a mechanism to analyze the online popularity of the presidential candidates. Candidate Facetime tracks the popularity of candidates online based on the amount of time people spend across the candidates’ websites and related sites on MySpace, YouTube, flickr, etc.
Here is the candidate facetime for December 2007.
Having followed it through the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, it appears that there might be some validity to the parameter after all. Before any of the primaries started, Ron Paul and Barrack Obama had the major share of the online activity. However, as the race neared the primaries, Huckabee and Clinton have eaten quite a chunk of the above two online leaders.
Google also unveiled its Google Trends service recently, which can report similar analytics. For instance, here is how the democratic and republican candidates fare amongst search and news results currently. Click on the picture to run the query using up-to-date data.
Democratic Candidates:
Republican Candidates:
It remains to be see how these online predictions will fall out for the rest of the primaries.
