• by Wayne Friedman , August 22, 2008

Heading into the national conventions, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama had an overall unique Internet audience that continues to be twice as large as Republican candidate John McCain, according to The Nielsen Company.

The finding came despite an Internet video audience for McCain that was more than double Obama's in July, thanks to press coverage surrounding a TV ad that compared Obama to Paris Hilton.

Obama recorded a 3.3 million unique audience compared to 1.6 million for McCain in July--about the same numbers as in June. In looking at just the subset of videos, McCain had a unique audience of 1,010,000 compared to Obama's 502,000.

Obama also leads in other Internet areas--including the area of advertising spending. Obama's advertising spending yielded five times more impressions in July than the previous month--417 million impressions against 80 million online impressions in June 2008. This compared to 31.5 million for McCain in July, and 23.5 million impressions in June.

The Democratic candidate also yielded the biggest volume when it comes to blogs and message boards. Obama maintained a healthy lead-in between June 1 and August 17--with more than double the amount of mentions with a 0.77% score, compared with McCain's 0.35%.

The top blogs that mentioned John McCain, ranked by number of messages between June 1 and August 17, were the HuffingtonPost.com, the DailyKos.com, Thinkprogress,org, Crooksandliars.com and theModerateVoice.com. The top blogs for Obama were HuffingtonPost.com, the DailyKos.com, AmericanThinker.com, theModerateVoice.com and Newshounds.com.

In regard to traditional TV, McCain ran significantly fewer local TV spots (57,132) than Obama (70,381), but McCain placed more than twice as many national cable ads (526) as Obama (142). McCain also placed more spot radio ads (256) than Obama (184). Obama and McCain ran a combined total of 127,513 local TV spots and 668 national cable TV advertisements between June 4, 2008, when campaigning for the general election began, and August 1, 2008. The candidates also placed 440 spot radio ads between June 4 and July 13.