HITWISE UK POLITICS UPDATE

UK Internet Users more interested in the US presidential race than domestic politics  

London, Friday 29 February 2008 Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today reveals that UK Internet users are more interested in the United States presidential race than politics at home. Senator Barack Obama is the most searched for political figure in the UK, receiving three times as many searches on his name last week as Hillary Clinton, and five times as many as Gordon Brown. John McCain ranked in fourth place, just ahead of David Cameron.

UK Internet visits to Barack Obama’s official website (www.barackobama.com) started to increase steadily from the end of January and, during the week of ‘Super Tuesday’ (week ending 9 February 2008) his website received more visits than any of the major UK political party websites. "Interest in Senator Obama has declined slightly since ‘Super Tuesday’ and his website now ranks one position behind The Conservative Party’s homepage (www.conservatives.com) in our Politics category, but it remains more popular than the websites of both Labour and the Liberal Democrats," commented Robin Goad, Director of Research at Hitwise UK.

Wikipedia, Google News and YouTube amongst the top destinations

UK search behaviour is similar across all of the three leading candidates still in the race for the White House. The website for each respective candidate, Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) and Google News UK (news.google.co.uk) are the top three websites visited after searches for ‘barack obama’, ‘john mccain’ and ‘hillary clinton’. The search term ‘barack obama’ ranked at #80 and #79 respectively amongst the search terms driving traffic to Google News UK and Wikipedia over the four weeks ending 23 February 2008.

The top search variation for Senator Obama over the four weeks ending 23 February 2008 was ‘barack obama biography’, while ‘barack obama muslim’ was the sixth most popular. YouTube was the ninth most visited website after searches for ‘barack obama’, and the fifth most popular search for the Democrat candidate was ‘barack obama youtube’. Senator Obama has a special page within YouTube for promotional videos and clips from the debates.

Top 10 UK Internet searches containing a US presidential candidate name, 4 weeks ending 23 February 2008

As is the case with Senator Obama, searches for John McCain relate to interest in his biography, with searches for ‘john mccain biography’ and ‘john mccain wiki’ included in the top 10 searches on the candidate's name for the four weeks ending 23 February 2008. UK Internet searchers are also interested in John McCain’s personal life, with three search variations within the top ten relating to the Senator’s wife.  The most popular variation on searches for Senator Clinton was ‘hillary clinton for president’, while other campaign related searches to appear in the top 10 included ‘hillary clinton campaign’ and ‘hillary clinton wisconsin’.

Interest in US election drives UK Internet users to US media sites

Increasing interest in the US election is causing UK Internet users to spend more time on American news and politics websites. UK Internet visits to the top US news websites increased by 30% year on year for the week ending 23 February 2008, faster than the 13% growth seen in the News and Media sector overall. The New York Times is the most visited online news source from North America, followed by MSNBC, Fox News and The Washington Post.

Interest in the US election is not just benefiting traditional US media players, however: of the top 20 political websites visited by UK Internet users for the week ending 23 February 2008, 11 were US based. The most popular website was The Truth Laid Bear (www.truthlaidbear.com), capturing one in twelve visits to the Politics category during the week ending 23 February 2008.

About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,400 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise's patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behaviour of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN) www.experiangroup.com operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up-to-date-analysis of online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst Weblogs at weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.

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