As the election enters its final phase, we thought this data might be worth sharing before it enters the ash-heap of history.
Compared with YouTube in general, viewers that comment on the candidates’ official videos slant disproportionately male (72% for Obama, 78% for McCain, compared with 56% YouTube-wide) and older (heavily gen-x). Overall, Obama has slim leads among females and the 20-24 age bracket.
John McCain’s campaign appears to be shifting resources away from YouTube. Overall, they are launching 39.8% fewer videos than last month, and the same number as August.
Perhaps not unrelated, McCain also hasn’t taken the lead in daily views for all of October (see graph below). And sadly, two of the four the clips mentioning him in the 100 most-viewed videos across sites this past week ending last Friday were of gaffes (example below). Ominous signs, perhaps.
While he is down in the polls now, it appears that John McCain’s supporters were disillusioned on YouTube much sooner. McCain’s average video rating (i.e. users give this video “4.2 stars out of 5″) has been steadily declining over time, taking a precipitous fall in the beginning of September, perhaps coinciding with his selection of Sarah Palin and uptick of visceral attack ads.
Barack Obama’s dominance in online video views is a cliche by now, but the overall figures mask the fact that John McCain packs more punch per video, especially recently. I pulled this for AdAge, but was sufficiently amazed that I thought I would re-post here.
McCain and Obama’s average views per video from their official YouTube channels for the month of September:
The young, savvy core of libertarian-leaning citizen video journalists all but disappeared when Ron Paul dropped out of the primaries, leaving YouTube to be an Obama (and increasingly Palin)-dominated space. But I suspect they’re back, this time to inform us that the subprime crisis and resulting credit crunch are in no small part the government’s fault. Of the top 25 most-viewed we are tracking across 20 sites this past week, this (among others) emerged:
Do you have a bunch of old VHS tapes of TV recordings from the ’80s that you keep meaning to throw away? Don’t. You never know when they might come in handy:
UPDATE: This clip was removed from YouTube due to a copyright claim from “Splash News,” which appears to be a paparazzi agency. Of course, pirated clips abound.
Sarah Palin’s celebrity power is rising quickly, especially when measured by online video views. Of the top 100 most-viewed videos across sites this past week, 13 were Palin-related, totaling 4,255,591 views (compare with McCain’s official YouTube channel views for the entire month of August: 7,568,064).
UPDATE: At over 337,544 views on YouTube (and that’s not including the many pirated versions), Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech has three times the number of views as John McCain’s speech, which has 113,072 views.
