Thursday, June 26, 2008

Lonely McCainiacs

Wash post: That's best seen on the Big Three social networking sites -- soc-nets, in onlinespeak -- where the junior Illinois senator beats the senior Arizona senator right into the ground. On MySpace, Obama lists more than 401,000 friends to McCain's nearly 56,000. A similar sevenfold gap exists on Facebook, where Obama supporters number 1,040,185 while McCain's clock in at 152,570.
And on YouTube, it's like Obama and McCain operate in two separate layers of the atmosphere. McCain's channel, which has posted 208 videos, has been viewed 3.7 million times; Obama's more than 1,100 videos on his channel have been viewed 53.4 million times.

The most obvious reason for the gap is age: Young voters are the savviest online users, and most of them flocked to Obama in the primaries. But the Internet's potential political effect is by no means limited to voters younger than 30. According to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project released last week, 46 percent of all Americans -- young and old -- have used the Web to get news about the campaign, share their opinions and mobilize friends, relatives and co-workers.

And as Obama has made clear, online is where the money is.