Updated: Jakob Nielsen left a comment below: with a caveat: “Note that both parts of this report seem to be pure speculation: it’s a pair of surveys, not a study. They asked consultants to speculate on what will work, and they asked voters to speculate on what might persuade them. In either case, the responses are nothing but guesses.”
A report from the nonpartisan E-Voter Institute shows that lotsa campaign money will be spend online in the next couple of years. The study, “Moving to the Mainstream: Web-Based Political Communications on the Road to 2008″ (the PDF can be downloaded here) shows that the percentage of political consultants devoting more than 20 percent of their campaign budgets online will rise from 12 percent to 32 percent between 2006 and 2008. By 2016, 42 percent of consultants say they will devote between 21 percent and 50 percent of their budgets online, compared with 11 percent today, while 18 percent say they will commit more than half of their budgets online, up from 1 percent now. This means greater revenues for online news/politics sites and blogs. Of consultants who bought online advertising in 2006, 26 percent said newspaper sites were the most effective…blogs were chosen by 17 percent, and portals and ethnic/religious sites 16 percent. Fifteen percent said search engines brought the most success.
Consultants say rich media is most effective, particularly in collecting e-mail addresses, taking surveys and for persuasion objectives.
Interestingly, voters polled separately for the study disagreed with consultants’ ideas of how to use the Internet for personal communications. While 21 percent of consultants said e-mail would be effective in winning campaigns, only 14 percent of voters agreed. On the flip side, 40 percent of voters said sites would help win campaigns, while 32 percent of consultants agreed. The study says the disparity stems from control: voters see e-mail as intrusive, while consultants like the control the medium affords them, and voters say they can control when to view a site, while consultants say they have less control over how voters see the message. However, a majority of both voters and consultants say that traditional media, TV & cable, will trump all in the next election.
The chart below: Which types of sites are most effective?

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