Nielsen, one of the outfits which tracks where web users spend time online, also asks survey respondents a series of questions about themselves-including, interestingly, their political leanings. So which sites are the most liberal, and conservative? The blue bars represent the proportion of the site's audience who declare themselves to be liberal or very liberal; the red bars represent conservative, moderate and undeclared. Daily Kos and Huffington Post, unsurprisingly, attract an overwhelmingly left-wing audience. Fox News and the Drudge Report draw the highest percentage of conservatives-even though Rupert Murdoch's news network still declares itself "fair and balanced."

One thing all the sites at the extremes have in common: the more partisan the appeal of the site, the less attractive its proposition to advertisers. That doesn't matter too much to owners like Matt Drudge: his news link site still only employs two people. But, once the election campaign is done, sites like the Huffington Post-worth $200m, we're told-will struggle. ($200m? Guffaw.)

[Source: Nielsen, January 2008]