While the White House gets more daily views on YouTube than any politician (by far), Obama’s new media team is starting to hit diminishing returns. Consider: July was the White House’s worst month in terms of views since the channel was created back in January, and White House videos are receiving the lowest ratings (i.e. “users give this video x stars out of five”) on record (see above).
It’s worth noting that this is coming at the same time as something of a resurgence on the right, as conservatives and libertarians crowd health care town hall meetings to heckle officials. Whether the events were “astroturfed” or not, they went viral, racking up 6,198,707 views in the past few weeks. Of course, spectacle and hyperbole tend to play well on YouTube, so whether these views represent a political force to contend with remains to be seen.
Want to automatically tweet your latest videos? Great news: there’s now a TubeMogul app for that. When uploading videos via TubeMogul, you can now check a box at the bottom of any video’s “Launch” page that will automatically send a tweet once the video goes live. The feature is basically TwitterFeed for video (those who know what that means).
Tweets look like this: “VIDEO: [Video's Title...] http//…”
And you might just want to use it: according to our latest research, audiences clicking on video links from Twitter watch a video 36.91% longer than viewers referred by Facebook and 49.98% longer than viewers referred by Digg, making Twitter an important medium for those content creators trying to reach the most engaged audiences.
Michael Learmonth over at AdAge included some of these figures in his recent piece on YouTube’s future, but I thought I would share the full graph. Basically, we took the top 100 all-time most-viewed “mid-tail” or “new media studio” content creators (i.e. Next New Networks, Howcast Studios, The Wall Street Journal’s videos etc.) and looked at their viewership growth. The results? Over the past six months, publishers saw their daily average views grow by an average of 4.98% per month. Although there have been several recent failures in the space (60Frames, ManiaTV), overall the sector is growing in terms of viewership.
Back in January, both houses of Congress created hubs on YouTube, referring viewers to their representatives’ respective channels. Despite heavy promotion by YouTube, including an ad unit in the “Most-Viewed” sections and several videos being featured on the homepage, most viewers yawned: views for all videos total 10,786,869, or just 19.4% of total views of Lady GaGa’s “Just Dance” music video.
The big surprise? Republicans continue to lead overall, with 6,190,217 views to the Democrats’ 4,596,652 views. Although much is written about a “tech gap” between Obama’s tech-savvy campaign and GOP efforts, that isn’t the case here–rants from Ron Paul and bailout/stimulus “outrage” videos pushed Republicans over the top. On YouTube, the libertarian wing of the Republican party appears to be tech-savvy and adept at making videos go viral when they put their mind to it (just check Ron Paul’s primary views or the Rick Santelli rant that sparked the “Tea Party” movement), which certainly helps the Republicans when properly harnessed.
Of course, since so few videos are posted, the battle for Congressional views is probably not a good barometer for the “netroots” battle, especially considering that this is the most popular video on the Democratic side:
We were sad to learn that several video journalists working for Current TV were recently detained by the North Korean government. Obviously our thoughts and prayers are with them. According to a news release (via the WSJ), “while other outlets are scaling back on their international investigations, the ‘Vanguard’ team is pushing the envelope. … We’re taking risks and using all of our resources to pursue the important stories that need to be told.”
In the interest of bipartisanship amidst Obama euphoria in online video, I thought I would share this video, which looks ahead to the 2012 election and dares Sarah Palin fans to top a Rhodes Scholar that cleaned up Louisiana. The video isn’t exactly going viral, but perhaps it’s a good sign for Jindal that visitors to this video’s channel trend younger, with 46.94% between the ages between the ages of 20 and 29.
Last week, the White House set up a YouTube channel to host official videos, and the first few videos are racking up an impressive number of views. In terms of demographics, Obama’s early audience slants younger (37.11% is 19 or under), and 16.98% more female than YouTube in general (below).
In terms of views from official campaign videos, last week’s “Obama-mercial” pushed him over the top, helping him maintain a lead in daily views for all of October (see graph below).
When broken down by individual video, however, McCain leads overall with 74,927 average views per video, compared to Obama’s 53,190 views.
Among fan videos and user-submitted clips, Obama leads with 1.761 billion views from clips on YouTube referencing him, compared with McCain’s 1.06 billion views.
