Saturday’s launch of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign sent traffic to her campaign website soaring as voters sought more information. On January 20, 2007, the market share of visits to HillaryClinton.com was more than 2X greater than the market share of visits to BarackObama.com on January 16, 2007, the day of the Illinois senator’s official campaign announcement. Clinton’s site was the #1 site in the Lifestyle – Politics category on Jan. 20, while Senator Obama’s campaign site reached a rank of #4 on Jan. 16.

Not only are political candidates taking advantage of the web to get their messages out, but also to gain volunteers and raise campaign contributions. Analysis of Hitwise Clickstream data on both sites shows that visitors were indeed considering making donations: 14.8% of the downstream traffic leaving HillaryClinton.com went to contribute.hillaryclinton.com, and 8.9% of the traffic leaving BarackObama.com went to secure.barackobama.com, his domain for collecting campaign contributions.
While it may appear that Senator Clinton could be attracting more donations, an analysis of demographic data shows that visitors to Senator Obama’s website are more likely to have annual household incomes over $150,000, which means they may be motivated to make bigger contributions. They are also older and more likely to be female than visitors to HillaryClinton.com. Senator Clinton’s website is showing a very strong representation with 18-24 year-olds, which could be good news for her campaign, as the 2008 election will almost certainly be strongly influenced by the web, and YouTube in particular.