The upcoming election in the United States is clearly the election of YouTube and social media. The websites of the presidential candidates are drawing substantial traffic — Nielsen Online estimates the week ending August 31st as 3.4 million unique visitors for Obama, and 1.8 million unique visitors for McCain (up from 524,000 the week before, a massive jump, the apparent result of naming Sarah Palin as his running mate). This is a huge boost for both campaigns over the unique visitors for the month of May, a quarter ago — 2.3 million for Obama, and 563,000 for McCain.

By dot-com and general media measures, these are respectable but not huge numbers. At the top of the popularity game, Facebook and Myspace boast about 115 million unique visitors world-wide, with MySpace tops in the US with around 75 million. Better comparisons might be the launch of the Age of Conan MMORPG (2.2 million unique visitors in 10 days), or the visitors to the website of Weight Watchers (around 2 million).

Websites have been mission-critical in this campaign. So who hosts all of this infrastructure? The traffic’s tremendously variable, the leadership of the free world is at stake… so who gets entrusted with it all?

We can figure that out.

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