Hitwise: Obama is a winner in Iowa and on the web Anyone who’s been tracking the numbers online wasn’t surprised by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s Iowa caucus victory last night. The Illinois senator’s web site saw 31 percent more hits from Iowans in the past four weeks compared with his closest competitor, Hillary Clinton, according to internet monitor Hitwise. Obama’s site also led second-runner up Clinton in New Hampshire by 18 percent more visitors. Both candidates’ online sites saw more visitors than any GOP candidates in the early primary states. However, that’s not the case nationwide, with Republican candidate Ron Paul building a significant internet lead over all the other candidates vying for the White House. Paul had 1.91 percent of the market share of all U.S. internet visits to web sites for presidential candidates. He was followed by last night’s Republican winner, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has 1.04 percent.   J.P. Morgan: Could be a banner year for display ads Don’t write off online display advertising just yet. While its numbers were relatively weak last year, the presidential election is expected to boost cost-per-thousand viewer rates in 2008. That’s according to at least one analyst with J.P. Morgan, who thinks better technology, among other factors, will help internet display ad revenues to rise at least 20 percent this year and perhaps as high as $10 billion come 2009. Analyst Imran Khan predicts that despite social network sites fragmenting web audiences, the TV writers’ strike and the subsequent lower broadcast TV ratings could add up to a boon for online ad revenues as marketers try to find other spots to place their ads. Khan predicts that the search market will grow nearly 40 percent this year to perhaps more than $30 billion.   CD sales tumble again as digital music also slows Last year was a tough one for the music industry and not just because of pop singer Britney Spears' very public meltdown. Nielsen SoundScan reports that album sales were down 15 percent compared with the previous year, hurt by competition from video games and illegal downloads. And it wasn’t just physical album sales that dropped. While sales of digital tracks were up 45 percent, they were well off the growth pace in 2006, which saw a 65 percent increase in digital track sales. Album sales on the web rose 2.4 percent to 30.1 million units, but that was down from a 19 percent jump in 2006. Only 500.5 million units of CDs and digital albums were sold in 2007, the worst number since Nielsen started tracking music album sales 15 years ago. Album sales peaked in 2000 at 785 million units.   S#% doesn't excel in China's most-searched-for terms Sex may be the most consistently searched-for subject matter in the U.S., but not so in China. According to Google China, the Chinese were much more fiscally minded than their U.S. counterparts. The word "stock" and the names of three national banks were among the terms that came out ahead of "sex" on the list of most-searched-for phrases on the search engine this year. At the very top of the list was "QQ," which is both a brand of car and a Chinese instant messaging service. China Merchants Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and China Construction Bank were second, third and sixth on the list, while stock was fourth. At least part of the reason finance was so much more represented on the list than sex may be due to China's attempts to stamp out online pornography and its censorship of search engines.