Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul Win Web Traffic War

Hillary Clinton has surged to the lead among presidential candidates in the war of the Web — her campaign site on the Internet attracted more visitors in October than any of her Democratic or Republican rivals.

In September, Hillary had 302,000 unique visitors to her campaign Web site, hillaryclinton.com, but that number more than doubled to 693,000 visitors in October, according to Nielsen Co. NetRatings projections.

Meanwhile Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican, has been winning the GOP Internet battle.

In October, his site, ronpaul2008.com, counted 451,000 visitors. Though lagging in national polls, Paul has been running an aggressive Web campaign.

Last week, Paul announced his coffers snagged an incredible $4.3 million in a single day of online fundraising. His campaign added another $1 million this week, officials said.

The number of visitors to Republican Fred Thompson’s site plunged in October. In the previous month, Thompson led all GOP and Democratic presidential candidates with 635,000 visitors to his site, fred08.com. But his site dropped to fifth place among Republican candidates’ sites in October, with only 152,000 unique visitors.

Here are the numbers of unique visitors for each of the presidential Web sites, according to NetRatings Inc. projections.

REPUBLICANS