insight 

With the US election finally reaching its conclusion today, it was interesting to read an article in the New York Times recently about domain name trends for the two presidential candidates.  Technology media company IDG used DomainTools to query for domains and discovered that there were 2,357 domains registered for Barack Obama and 1,431 domains for John McCain.  When they expanded the query to domains with either “Obama” or “McCain” included in them, the results were 11,089 for Obama and 5,378 for McCain.

Digging deeper into the various domains registered revealed that there was a mixture of sites for and against each of the candidates, as well as their running mates.  Some of the domains were likely to have been registered or run by the campaigns themselves, in an effort to control the message.  Among the others, not run by the campaigns of either candidate there are a variety of sites including clear expressions of support or opposition; attempts at political satire; entrepreneurial sites selling items and inappropriate domains.

There’s lots more detail and various trend analysis available of web traffic over at Network World, which sheds a little more light on how the campaign went, much of which is of course redundant in the light of today’s result.  However, it does, of course, demonstrate the ever increasing usage of the Internet and the impact of web 2.0 in such campaigns. It also gives some pointers for brand managers (lets face it that’s what these campaigns are about) to a range of tools useful for analysing web site and domain name trends.