Obama Outdueling McCain on Web

In what has been an overall lackluster year to date for political advertising online, Sen. Barack Obama has outdone Sen. John McCain when it comes to generating exposure and traffic on the Internet - or at least through the first six months of the year, said comScore. Obama averaged over 90 million display ad impressions per month from January to June of this year, versus McCain's average of 7.4 million, found comScore's new report. That disparity peaked in June when Obama's ad operations team ran over 240 million impressions to McCain's 3.2 million -- however, it should be noted that this gap in activity occurred when Obama's campaign was in the final stages of a prolonged primary battle with Sen. Hillary Clinton, while McCain had wrapped up his party's nomination month's earlier. On the search front, where McCain has been the more active advertiser, based on various recent reports -- Obama is generating far more "natural" searches. comScore found that from January to June Obama's name averaged 5.4 million search queries a month versus McCain's average of 1.3 million. Thus, as a result of the heavier search interest and display ad volume, Obama's Web site has consistently drawn a larger crowd, averaging four times as many unique users from January to June (2.2 million versus 583,000).