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.
Ron Paul’s YouTube Channel has 12,792 subscribers. Almost ten times the amount of Giuliani.
http://www.youtube.com/RonPaul2008dotcom
Congressman Ron Paul now has twice as many YouTube subscribers as all of the other Republican candidates for president combined. Here are the numbers:
http://www.ronpaul2008.typepad.com/
Please post a correction for your readers.
Thank you.
But how could Paul possibly have all those subscribers?? I thought he didn’t have any actual support outside of those couple dozen facebook kids who spend their whole day spamming online polls!
In your “Note to Paulites”, you seem to have confused a private individual’s Ron Paul channel with the official channel (which has 11,000 more subscribers). I thought you bloggers were supposed to be on top of this stuff. However, TubeMogul is reporting on the correct channel. Looks like you’ll need one more update to this post.
http://www.youtube.com/RonPaul2008dotcom
It does point out something intersting though. A channel created by an individual Ron Paul supporter has about the same amount of subscribers as the official Rudy channel.
Channel: RonPaul2008dotcom (campaign) = 13,752 Subscribers
Channel: RudyGiulianiHQ (campaign) = 1,463 Subscribers
Channel: VoteRonPaul08 (individual) = 1,378 Subscribers