http://blog.wired.com/…

Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s supporters are hoping that they can best their Republican counterparts’ fund-raising prowess online.

Girish Manchaiah, a 35-year-old software engineer and Obama supporter in Springboro, Ohio, has set up an online fund-raising deadline of November 16th to raise $5 million.

Asked whether he was inspired by Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s supporters, who recently raised $4.2 million in 24 hours, Macchaiah said: “Not really — I think Ron Paul’s people are inspired by what we’re doing online.”

I somehow doubt that. Lets look at the facts.

• Meetup groups:
  • 62,129 Ron Paul Supporters in 1,174 Groups from 920 Cities
    …and 7,184 more waiting to hear when a new Meetup starts!
    • 52.921 supporters/group, 67.532 supporters/city
  • 3,420 Barack Obama Supporters in 61 Groups from 53 Cities
    …and 1,901 more waiting to hear when a new Meetup starts!
    • 56.066 supporters/group, 64.528 supporters/city
• YouTube cumulative viewership by day:
  • Barack Obama: 4,767,826
  • Ron Paul: 6,000,541
• Blog mentions via Technorati on 11/13/2007:
  • Barack Obama: 809
  • Ron Paul 1,173
• Weekly traffic share, via Hitwise:
  • Barack Obama: 13%
  • Ron Paul: 23%

Only in MySpace and Facebook supporters does Obama beat Paul. I’m going to speculate that a Meetup supporter is worth more than a MySpace supporter. Being part of several Meetups for Paul and spending a decent amount of time with the people volunteering… I’ve not once heard a person mention MySpace or Facebook. They aren’t designed to organize people the way Meetup is. And WRT the blog mentions… it may not be as good as MSM mentions but a lot of people will run across the larger blogs when looking at the news online. I get a lot of traffic from Google’s blog search and regular searches. Also… it was the Paul people that did the money bomb thing first. I’ve a hard time believing that they’d be doing this if we hadn’t. It doesn’t matter. We aren’t fighting against any D’s… yet. This just makes the whole thing more competitive, even if they say otherwise, and that can only help drive the TeaParty07 money bomb further. If they raise $5m on Nov. 16th. We’ll raise $10m on Dec. 16th.