On a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of January, the majority of the country is not sitting in front of their television. Although I’m sure many took the day off from work to watch the festivities from home (and more than a million to be there), most turned to the web for out inauguration coverage. And most of those people turned to CNN.com.

Not surprisingly, all news sites saw a significant spike on such this historic day, with CNN.com seeing over 4% of all U.S. internet users. While CNN received the most visitors, many of the other news sites had greater percentage increases, with the CBS News leading the way, with nearly 100% increas for both daily change and over 160% for monthly change.

Even the relatively flat traffic to WhiteHouse.gov saw an unprecedented spike as the Obama team relaunched the site on Tuesday, dwarfing the interest surge shown on election day.

Now that the swearing in and celebrations are over, we’ll see if interest falls back to normal levels or if the new WhiteHouse.gov site will be continue to draw more visitors.

A quick comparison of traffic trends to the Barack Obama and John McCain’s websites in the closing weeks of the race shows a surge of support for Obama last week versus only a modest gain by McCain. For the week ended November 1st, nearly 4.9 million people visited Obama’s website, a 60% rise over the previous week, and twice the level Obama reached on the heels of his August convention speech. McCain saw just a 9% increase in his site traffic last week to 1.4 million, meaning that in the final week of the race, McCain finally reached the level of traffic he enjoyed after announcing Sarah Palin as his running mate.

A political unknown only a couple years ago, Obama succeeded in defeating the Clinton machine in the primaries and the GOP’s standard bearer last night, in part, thanks to his skillful leveraging of the Internet to connect with voters and marshal their support.

Congratulations to President-Elect Obama who in January will be sworn-in as our nation’s 44th President.

Click here to download the weekly traffic data shown above.

As Americans head to the polls today, a look back at the closing weeks of the race reveals that Barack Obama increasingly distanced himself from John McCain in the online race as the election neared.

Weekly unique visitors to Obama’s website (graphed below) quickly rose from 540,000 at the start of August to an interim peak of 2.5 million during the week of the Democratic National Convention. The race narrowed online the following week as attention shifted to the Republicans (Sarah Palin in particular.) After the dust from the conventions settled, Obama’s traffic continued to soar, fueling his record $150 million in campaign contributions in September. Obama’s traffic later eclipsed his convention-fueled spike three weeks before Election Day.

McCain’s traffic also rose in the lead up to November 4th, but his growth was relatively modest compared to Obama’s. One reason for this was that McCain, unlike Obama, kept his promise to accept public campaign financing. As a result, McCain received a one-time cash infusion from the Federal Government but was then prevented, in the general election from soliciting contributions from voters. McCain’s traffic peaked after Palin was added to the ticket in late August, but never again reached that level throughout the remainder of the race.

The above graph also plots the weekly ratio of Obama visitors to McCain visitors. During the final eight weeks of the race, Obama’s site traffic averaged 2.2 times greater than that of his GOP rival.

Traffic to online video on popular news sites, video blogs, YouTube and other sites has seen a 5x increase since our last presidential election in 2004, but has online video changed how people engage in politics this time around?

The latest results of Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Pulse Survey, which includes data from Compete and responses from about 1,800 registered U.S. voters, found that the internet is second only to television as a significant source of political information this election cycle, and online video users tend to follow the race more closely than those who don’t watch online video.

Key findings include:

• 62% of respondents said that they regularly access information about the presidential election online through their PCs
• About 30% of registered voters said they watched video related to the presidential election online, and 75% of them felt it helped them follow events more closely
• Online video watchers seem to be more engaged in the election than other respondents; 62% of online video users say they follow the presidential election closely, while only 37% of non-online video users do

What might these findings mean after November 4th? One implication is that future candidates will have more targeted and efficient means of reaching voters with their respective messages.

Although TV is still the pervasive medium for news, more people are seeking out video on demand through the internet. Cisco’s Visual Networking Forecast predicted that by 2012, the next time Americans choose a president, there will be a 6x increase in global IP traffic, and that video on demand, television over IP and Internet TV will make up 90% of consumer IP traffic by that time.
For additional results and more information about this study and Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, visit www.cisco.com/go/vni.

As the presidential race enters its long-last homestretch this weekend, Barack Obama continues to leverage his online advantage to feed his campaign’s insatiable appetite for campaign contributions to fuel his massive advertising blitz (Exhibit A: last night’s nationwide infomercial). Compete’s most recent data on traffic to the candidates’ websites shows that BarackObama.com attracted over 3 million unique visitors last week, compared to the 1.3 million that visited JohnMcain.com.

Absent an October surprise in the final weekend of the race, John McCain faces stiff odds of turning the latest polls around at this late date and his VP choice appears to have been an ill-timed and poorly placed bet. The table below compares the candidates across several web stats in September, including Compete’s FaceTime metric which measures the candidates’ share of voice with voters online.

By most measures, Obama leads McCain handiy online. And while McCain’s Wikipedia article was more widely read than Obama’s last month, this was due largely to spill-over from readers seeking information on Sarah Palin. For the second straight month, Palin’s Wikipedia article was the most popular on the site with nearly 1.4 million readers, 11% of whom also read McCain’s article. Joe Biden, despite his knack for saying things he and the Obama campaign later regret, has largely been a non-factor in this race as voters have focused elsewhere. Interestingly, Cindy McCain received more attention last month on Wikipedia than the Democratic VP candidate.

McCain gambled when selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate, hoping she could help him pick off disenfranchised Clinton supporters while somehow, at the same time, help him curry favor with long skeptical social conservatives. That bet seemed a long shot at the time and appears to have not worked out as intended. Certainly Palin’s addition to the ticket has added much-needed youth and vitality to the campaign, but her poor showings in limited press interviews combined with suggestions of impropriety in her governing of Alaska over the past few weeks have dimmed her Halo effect on the race and with it McCain’s chances. When the economic crises struck last month, McCain and Palin’s combined limited economic experience handicapped the campaign’s ability to present a compelling case to voters that they could lead the nation out of this mess if elected.

As Americans became more familiar with Palin last month, interest in her as a candidate was replaced in many ways with interest in Tina Fey’s characterization of her on Saturday Night Live. The chart below compares Sarah Palin article readership on Wikipedia with searches for her on YouTube and show that interest in Sarah Palin on Wikipedia subsided soon after the Republican National Convention as the popular press recovered from their flat footedness. For the week of September 14th, following the season premiere of SNL, searches for “Sarah Palin” made up for 2.5% of all searches on YouTube as viewers rushed to find video clips of the SNL sketch. YouTube interest in Sarah Palin repeatedly spiked after subsequent episodes of SNL and for the month of September, “Sarah Palin” was the most widely searched for term on the video sharing website. Undoubtedly these sketches made an impact on the race.

It has been a very long race and I have enjoyed following it for Compete and adding my commentary and analysis of our data to the nationwide political conversation. Win or lose on Tuesday, Obama’s mastery of the web is sure to be studied and mimicked by political hopefuls in future elections.

As Senators Barack Obama and John McCain crisscross the country in search of votes, clog the airwaves with advertisements, and tighten their seemingly iron grip in the popular media and blogosphere, it’s no surprise that Americans are paying increasing attention to the race. Compete’s latest data on traffic trends to the candidate’s websites shows Obama maintaining his 2 to 1 advantage online.

Of course for all that’s made of national election data and polls, in the end, the race will be decided in the trenches at the state level. In reality, only a dozen or so “battleground” states hold the keys to the White House next month.

A state-by-state look at the online activities of Americans across the country suggests that voters in certain pockets of the country are following the race more closely that people elsewhere, which could portend lower voter turnout in some key contests. The map and table below compare interest in the election as gauged by the percentage of each state’s residents who visited a candidate’s website or top political blog in September. For comparison, look at a similar post we did last year.

Observations:

• More than residents of any other state, Coloradoans are following the election the closest, at least online. 1 in 8 Coloradoans, who were online in September, visited a candidate’s website or top political blog. This battleground state that has voted Republican in the past 3 elections, is considered by many to be “in-play” for Obama this year.
• Easterners certainly love their politics…if not their politicians. Interest in the race, generally speaking, is highest in the Northeast and greater D.C. area.
• Residents online in other parts of the country, particularly the Deep South are paying considerably less attention to the race. The bottom ten states, in terms of online interest, all hail from traditionally Republican states across the Deep South. The general ambivalence towards this race suggests that despite the addition of Sarah Palin to the ticket, McCain has failed to connect with social conservatives in the Republican Party.