Despite the best efforts of an Icelandic volcano to ground all Northern European flights and take (obscure?) the limelight, last week’s leaders’ debate grabbed a lot of media attention. The consensus view is that Nick Clegg came out on top, and UK searches for the Liberal Democrat leader increased 7-fold last week, clearly overtaking both David Cameron and Gordon Brown. We monitored nearly 1,200 distinct search terms containing the phrase ‘nick clegg’ last week, with the top 10 dominated by the usual terms such as ‘nick clegg mp’, ‘nick clegg wiki’ and ‘nick clegg wife’. As you get further you get down the top 20, a few slightly less expected terms do start appearing, including ‘nick clegg twitter’, ‘nick clegg 30 women’, ‘nick clegg atheist’ and ‘nick clegg height’.

The ‘Nick Clegg Effect’ also had a positive impact on visits to the Liberal Democrats’ homepage last week, as the chart below illustrates. Last week it continued to rank third amongst the major parties homepages, but its share of visits increased from 26.2% to 31.2%.

So who else benefited from the event? In addition to a 3.6% increase in visits to Politics sites on April 16th, there was a 12.7% increase in traffic to News and Media sites. BBC News and the BBC homepage maintained the top two spots, but the big winners were Sky News (visits up 76.9% yesterday) and ITV (up 58.7%).

And then of course there was Twitter. Although there wasn’t the massive spike that some expected, visits to the website did increase to a new high on April 16th. Twitter.com was the 23rnd most visited websites in the UK yesterday (although, as always, it would have been even more popular that our numbers suggest. We are only measuring people using the service via their browser, not through apps or mobile devices).

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