Drilling Down Red Web Sites Versus Blue Web Sites [View All]

By ALEX MINDLIN - NY Times

Rush Limbaugh’s Web site has a higher concentration of Republican visitors than any other site on the Web, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, the Internet traffic measurement firm. The Web site of Black Entertainment Television occupies a corresponding position among Democrats. The numbers represent the percentages of each party registration among people who said they had browsed the sites within the preceding 30 days, as reported to NetRatings this summer. (The data was weighted to reflect the age and gender of all American Internet users.)

Republican-skewing sites tend to be explicitly directed at conservative readers: after Mr. Limbaugh, the highest concentrations of Republicans are at The Weekly Standard’s home page and at NewsMax, a site offering a conservative tilt to news. By contrast, the most Democratic-leaning sites contain relatively nonpolitical fare intended for a mostly black audience: after BET.com come BlackAmericaWeb.com and BlackPlanet.com.

“The Web sites that are the most heavily composed of Democrats are not focused on politics, but on communities that are heavily Democratic,” said Kenneth Cassar, the chief analyst for NetRatings. “I don’t know whether that tells us that Democrats haven’t figured out how to make politics entertaining.” ALEX MINDLIN

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/technology/04drill.html