Hillary is First to Surpass Obama in Cumulative Viewership

It was bound to happen. With the YouChoose ‘08 Spotlight upping the stakes for online video in the presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s politubing dominance couldn’t last forever. And it happened on May 20th after Hillary’s Spotlight blitz. Incredibly, Hillary went from 205K views to over 1.1M in just over a week.

Interestingly, her biggest bang wasn’t initially coming from her Spotlight video. In that video, she lightens up the over-trodden “what should I do, America?” request for feedback on how to run the country to an “I need some advice” — on what her campaign song should be (Ari Melber writes about the official choices here). Three days prior to that video, hubby Bill spoke on her behalf, gaining 222K views in the first day. The video where she taps the nation for DJ help garnered 132K views on the first day, but has shown more longevity than Bill. The blue line is total Hillary views per day, the green line is what came from Bill’s video and the red from the Spotlight video.

This was a good move - letting someone else give the serious talk while Hillary works to shed the Big Brother image by using the Spotlight video to show a sense of humor and be a little different than the previous candidates. Will Bill continue to be a force in Hillary’s campaign?

May 23rd, 2007

The Impact of YouChoose 08 on the Politubing Race

We’ve been working hard to push out some new features that our users have brought to our attention, and you can now compare all your publishers in one chart. We decided to look at the presidential candidates on YouTube that have been in the YouChoose 08 Spotlight - Mitt Romney (4-11), John Edwards (4-18), John McCain (4-25), and Kucinich (5-2). We added Barack Obama to the mix to see how his once-giant lead was faring. The trends shown in the chart are cumulative.

Mitt Romney had the first mover advantage and has received the biggest jump in views from the Spotlight thus far. In fact, each time, the Spotlight has meant less views, so we’re seeing some fatigue on the simple variations of the request, “Tell me what needs to change, America.” What will we see next?

May 9th, 2007