This past weekend, Jeff Jarvis pointed out that Hillary Clinton’s entry for the YouTube YouChoose Spotlight — help choose the campaign theme song! — has been, by no small margin, the most successful entrant. Here’s a chart generated by techPresident/TubeMogul:
[Remember: These are cumulative figures; people are not still watching past Spotlights in great numbers.]
My guess in April was that Romney was lucky to go first, but looking at the whole picture (on techPresident you can drag the scroll bar) it seems that yes, Romney did very well, but Edwards did slightly better (saying something about both their online support). Meanwhile, McCain and Kucinich got some lift but not much (saying something about both their lack thereof).
How many videos is that specifically, and how many views for each? Here’s a handy guide, presented in order of candidate particpation (numbers were accurate as of Tuesday morning):
| Romney 441,504 35,594 2,615 11,754 | Edwards 371,970 6,412 | McCain 301,113 10,871 1,137 1,179 | Kucinich 294,352 1,541 511 831 | Hunter 292,253 | Hillary 546,691 128,632 | Huckabee 92,505 |
It’s no surprise that the candidate’s follow-up videos were much less-viewed than the originial, but Hillary’s sequel did much better than any of her rivals. And yet her first YouChoose video received just 18 responses, far behind the 71 responses to Romney.
Meanwhile, her actual YouTube account is entirely locked down. Where most other candidates list friends, subscribers and some even their own subscriptions, Hillary’s YouTube account has none of these: the communication is strictly one-way.
Yet her subscribers number about 3,470, second only to Obama’s approximate 5,940 (and he hasn’t participated in the YouChoose Spotlight yet). This is interesting — because it challenges the arguments made by Dana Boyd at this year’s Personal Democracy Forum that the “digital handshake” — candidate interactivity and reciprocity — is necessary for an effective online campaign.
These big numbers probably represent curiosity more than anything; and assuming that YouTube’s viewership is less politically charged than the political blogosphere, it helps to have an early presence with casual voters. She needs to keep them. After all, the other big online news for Hillary in this month’s Daily Kos straw poll was that her netroots support doubled: from 3% to 6%.
Note to Paulites: Your man trails Giuliani by ~1400 to ~1100 subscribers. Better get on that!
Update: Blog P.I. gets results! As of Thursday night, Ron has 1334 while Rudy is mired at 1452.