MySpace Enters the 2008 Presidential Campaign

MySpace has entered the upcoming U.S. presidential race with a new website dedicated to the presidential campaign. Analysts feel this will be an excellent way to reach millions of people who otherwise would show little interest in politics.

The new political arm of MySpace is called MySpace Impact. One of the main features of the new website will be MySpace pages for each of the presidential candidates running in the 2008 campaign.

A number of presidential candidates didn't want to lose a second in the chance to reach an untapped group of people when the MySpace Impact site launched on Monday. Candidates who had their pages up and running by launch included Democratic candidates; Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich, John Edwards and Republican candidates; Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

The new MySpace Impact political website aims to provide information about the candidates in a format the site's users can relate to, making it much more accessible and interesting to potentially millions of people. The CEO of MySpace, Chris DeWolfe has said "MySpaace hopes to play a powerful role in the 2008 elections. The site plans to give users easy-to-use information in a format they can relate to."

The amount of people visiting MySpace is enormous. In February MySpace received nearly 65 million unique visitors from the U.S. alone. The people who use MySpace in the U.S. make up around 37 percent of the Internet users in the United States.

The untapped voter potential is immense. The average age of frequent MySpace users is 18 to 24. This age group is also the age group that is thought to be least likely to visit political websites.

Only a few hours after launching the MySpace pages of the presidential candidates were already clocking up the friends. By the afternoon, Hilary Clinton had over 1,000 and Barack Obama had nearly 70,000.

One thing that will determine the number of MySpace users visiting the pages of the 2008 presidential candidates in the information they provide. It is important for the candidates to offer interesting information to gain the most benefit from their page.