The "facetime" a candidate gets with voters using online media is now being measured by Compete.com in a new measurement service called Candidate FaceTime^TM.

"..That changes today. Compete is proud to unveil Candidate FaceTime^TM, offering a holistic, web wide means of measuring how well the candidates are using all of these channels to get “face time” with voters. Harnessing the depth and breadth of Compete’s 2 million member US panel, the metric quantifies the total amount of time voters spend online with candidates each month. Every minute counts in this race as every minute spent with a candidate is one less minute that might have been spent with a rival."

Here's how the major candidates of both parties measured up over the last month in "facetime":

The curious thing, to me, is how Ron Paul gets so much "facetime" when he's not really the leading candidate of either party.

"…While long claimed by his supporters, the extent of Ron Paul’s online support is finally and clearly evident with this data. In total, voters spent nearly 170,000 hours learning about, connecting with and supporting Paul in October. While that was more the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton combined, more striking during the looming primary contests is that Paul’s total was more than all of the other GOP candidates combined. Over a quarter of Paul’s FaceTime occurred on meetup.com, a testament to his supporters’ determination to marshal their online momentum into off-line action. "

I guess, the amount of facetime, as measured here, and how it factors into how people will actually vote, is still an unknown.  If it turns out that Ron Paul wins a lot of Republican primaries, many things will change very quickly.   On the other hand, if people, overall, turn out not to make decisions in the voting booth based on their exposure to Internet media by candidates - much of this information will be of limited value.

We need to see how the Presidential Primaries turn out - and then we'll know.