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?

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On the heels of Mitt Romney’s pioneering politubing – engaging YouTube-using voters by requesting video responses to his question – John Edwards posts his own JFK-esque question for viewers to respond to, and the resulting increase in views of his videos is on a similar trajectory as Romney experienced last week.

It will be interesting to see where Edwards peaks in viewership, how many replies he receives (currently at 43 videos), and how long this and follow-up videos can keep interest high. Will all the candidates spin through this exercise with slight differences in question? Who will be the first to build follow-on momentum and how? It’s fun to watch this campaign laboratory and how each organization acts on the results… we’re witness to the primordial soup of politubing!

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The first round for France’s Presidential election is this Sunday, and polls are showing Sarkozy and Royal in a dead heat. Pollsters are predicting the two will move on to the second round and both get 50% of the vote in that election on May 6th.

There hasn’t been a ton of online video activity this past week, which is a little bit surprising to us. We see much of what we described last week in this blog – here’s how it looks since 4-10:

It’s interesting that in a race with so many candidates, the two leading the pack are at the left and right poles. Many in the media feel that in the end, voters are going to choose based on candidates’ personalities rather than their politics. Is that accounted for in the polls already or does that mean those polled may change their minds at the voting booth? Perhaps we’ll learn the answer to that shortly.

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Mitt Romney has shaken the politubing world (or at least the order that had been established –Dems are internet savvy and the Republicans are laggards navigating the “series of tubes”). Last week, Romney made a brilliant request for anyone to reply to his YouTube video with one of their own to describe, “What do you believe is America’s greatest challenge?” Much like the Ashley Tisdale contest, this has produced a large response (67 response videos to date, Blog PI watched and made notes on all 54 posted up through last Saturday, and PrezVid comments on some as well) and an even larger up swell in viewership of Mitt Romney’s video.

Looking at Mitt’s own YouTube views, it almost looks as if he wasn’t online prior to that video – he went from about 3K views a day to 125K on 4/13!

The overall effect on the top Republicans vs. top Dems is just as substantial.

From a marketing perspective, Romney is applying a modified version of the Tisdale contest model to the campaign, and it has gained interest. More importantly, however, is how it engages people in the process with Gov. Romney. Here’s a medium much more personal for the politician than a letter or an email, and maybe even a town hall meeting because in that setting the campaigner is going to hear so much in a short period of time that a single message might get diluted. Here, if Mitt watches it, he can watch it when he chooses and replay as many times to get the exact point. He could also ask others to rate the views presented and begin to use the same phrasing in his own message. He can see the non-verbal message and tone of the responder, too. And he receives (for the most part) well-thought and practiced ideas – bumping into someone at a town hall can make people feel rushed to get their points across and might not come out right. As you can tell, we love what’s happening here!

From the chart you can see the views have tailed off some, and from a little analysis you can find that the majority of Romney’s views were for his one video asking for information, not on videos where planks of his platform are espoused. Will Mitt be able to continue the debate on YouTube with the energy he just started? Going back to the Tisdale contest where a simple video saying “Keep ‘em coming!” produced another bump, I’m guessing he should be able to continue the YouTube presence, at least for awhile. Will this translate into people learning about his platform and ideals, or is it good enough that people engage in political participation and potentially help shape the direction of Romney’s campaign? If nothing else, it’s great to watch the responses and see what some caring, thoughtful, non-politicians think. Hopefully this new means of sharing views for improving the country doesn’t lose its appeal as it becomes more prevalent.

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With the upcoming French presidential election right around the corner (April 22nd, with a final election taking place between the top two candidates on May 6th if no candidate wins over 50% of the vote in the April 22nd election), we decided to take a look at the online video viewership of the two leading candidates, Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy.

How do you say, Le Politubing?

Ségolène is the candidate for the Socialist Party and Sarkozy is the candidate for Union for a Popular Movement. We admittedly don’t know that much about French politics, but from our understanding, Sarkozy represents the liberal-conservatives and more of a libertarian, free-market ideal, while Royal’s party is large and has a long history with several factions. While some might see “Socialist” and think of socialism in the Marxist sense (in opposition to capitalism), the majority part of the Socialist Party fall under the “Social Democracy” ideology which is more of capitalism moderated by social democracy to correct for injustices that might arise from a purely capitalist ideology.

In our American mindset where the left skews younger and the right skews older, we see more web video viewership with the Democrats. Interestingly, in the web videos views of French politics, we see less of a push from Ségolène’s camp, especially in the past several weeks, whereas Sarkozy’s campaigners have pumped out several videos recently, with 13 interviews put out on 4-10 alone and viewership an order of magnitude higher than for Ségolène. From across the Atlantic it’s difficult to know the state of either party’s campaign, but it’s clear that the Socialist Party is not as focused on web videos for campaigning, at least on YouTube.

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The “Hillary 1984” video has been a huge boon to video viewership for the Democrats over the past few days, including the videos officially put out by the Obama and Hillary camps. The attack ad/video was posted by an unknown party on YouTube, and uses Apple’s ad from the 1984 Super Bowl to portray Hillary as Big Brother, hypnotizing the masses with meaningless buzz-speak.

It comes as no surprise that the attack video has been widely distributed and viewed (over 1.5M views at last count, with over 600K on 3/20 alone), but it is interesting to see that the buzz has spilled over to viewership on Hillary and Obama’s official videos. Below is a chart shown here before – an aggregate of views on the top 3 Dems (Obama, Hillary, Edwards) videos on YouTube vs. that of the top 3 Republicans (Giuliani, McCain, and Romney).

This uptick in viewership comes almost entirely from videos views of BOTH Obama and Hillary (though MUCH greater increase in Obama views). People seem to have taken greater interest in these two Democratic candidates after the attack video.

From the first chart, it is also notable that the Republicans had steadily closed the gap and even surpassed the Dems in online viewership on 3/17 (those Irish Democrats!), but once the “Hillary 1984” was published, the picture drastically changed.

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