Shift in Political Issues Revealed By Hitwise Search Term Data
‘huffington post’ Top Search Term Overall in Politics Category for Past Week

NEW YORK, NY – September 22, 2006 – Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that search term data for September 2006 (12 weeks ending 9/16/06) reveals how political issues have shifted compared to the same time period in September 2005 and September 2004. The search term ‘abortion’ was the most searched for political issue sending visits to the Hitwise Lifestyle – Politics category for the 12 weeks ending September 16, 2006. ‘Abortion’ received the largest volume of searches among political issue search terms for the same time period in 2005 and 2004.

The top political issue related terms following ‘abortion’ for the 12 weeks ending September 12, 2006 were ‘military deaths in iraq’, ‘antiwar’ and ‘hezbollah’. This contrasts with ‘biodiesel’, ‘death penalty’ and ‘american flag’ for the 12 weeks ending September 17, 2005. For the 12 weeks ending September 18, 2004, the top political issue terms following ‘abortion’ were ‘american flag’, ‘homeland security’ and ‘gay marriage’.

The top search term overall for the Lifestyle - Politics category was 'huffington post' for the 12 weeks ending September 16, 2006. For the same period in 2005 the top term was ‘michael moore’ and in 2004 it was ‘john kerry’.

“Consumer Internet behavior provides great insight into the American public’s prioritization of political concerns,” said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. “For example, the change in search terms resulting in traffic to the 841 sites that we monitor in our Lifestyle – Politics category is a great proxy for top-of-mind issues as we get close to November’s mid-term elections.”

Online Election Traffic

As the Internet plays an increasingly prevalent role in the elections across the country, Hitwise has created custom categories of different candidates' websites for a few Senate races this election year. The table below shows the percentage market share of visits to the candidates' websites respectively, compared against each other for the week ending September 16, 2006.

Blogs Increasing Influencer in Online Politics

To take a closer look at the different traffic channels driving traffic to the politics category please visit the Hitwise blog post at:  http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/09/blogs_increasing_influencer_in.html

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,200 global clients with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology captures the anonymous online usage, search, and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into our easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement, and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise is a privately held company headquartered in New York City and operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at  www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends and statistics, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence Analyst Weblogs at weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.