Study: Blogs Love Obama, News Sites Love McCain. But McCain Is Catching Up By Going Negative.
Attributor captured the candidates’ official speeches and position statements from the campaign sites, www.johnmccain.com and www.barackobama.com, and then scoured more than 25 billion pages on the Web to see where those words reappeared. In general, Obama’s message continues to resonate more overall, but just barely. Attributor estimates that Obama’s message was picked up on Websites that drew 38 million pageviews over the past two weeks, compared to 36 million pageviews for Websites that picked up McCain’s message. This represents a 10 percent surge by McCain.
In general blogs still favor Obama by about two to one, but the opposite is true for traditional news sites. McCain’s speeches and position statements appear on traditional news sites 80 percent more often than Obama’s. And on the sites of the major TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox), McCain has a 3 to 1 advantage. (This ratio should come down with the Democratic convention this week).
A deeper dive into the data confirms another obvious conclusion: Obama has better speech writers than McCain. Two thirds of the Obama citations across the Web come from his speeches as opposed to his issue papers and position statements. For McCain, 55 percent of his messaging being picked up elsewhere comes from his position statements.
The single topic for each candidate that resonated the most across the Web over the past two weeks was the economy, which for Obama overtook Iraq as a hot-button issue for the first time. The most popular speeches for each candidate was McCain’s Energy Security speech, and Obama’s Berlin speech (which has gone viral and has been viewed more than an estimated two million times).