I wanted to share a good post by a “search marketer” whose job it is to know what people are looking for. Major news media outlets have been losing credibility with more and more people lately as they see them ignore Ron Paul or give him very biased, limited coverage. The media have tried to explain away their lack of coverage by saying that people aren’t interested in hearing about Ron Paul and that he’s unelectable anyways, even though he continually scores at or near the top of most polls, including the news outlets’ own. This search marketer looks at some data to see if there really is interest in Ron Paul or not.
The results will likely be surprising to some. For example, Ron Paul currently gets about 3 times as many searches for his name on Google than Mitt Romney. Back when both of these candidates ran for president in 2008, Ron Paul got twice as many searches as Mitt Romney, yet the media covered Mitt Romney twice as much as Ron Paul. An exact flip flop. Also interesting is that you can see a chart of the United States with a “heat map” of where the searches are coming from and Ron Paul’s visits are from all over the the country. Mitt Romney’s, on the other hand, primarily come from Utah and Idaho, unsurprisingly, showing that Ron Paul is much more interesting to a wider audience than Mitt Romney. And when compared to the other candidates, you can see in the charts that Ron Paul dominates all of them in “user interest”.
It’s a short, but insightful read and I think his conclusion as to why the media does this is pretty on the money. Here’s the link to the story with the data on how the mainsteam media is under-reporting Ron Paul.
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