Spikes in online video views and comments tend to both precede and follow spikes in campaign contributions.
Of course, correlation between video views and campaign donations does not necessarily imply causation, and countless political variables like primary results and debate performances cloud an already complex picture. But televised debates have been around since John F. Kennedy nixed Nixon, and perceived mistakes are as old as the Jay Treaty. What is different, then? Online video.
Online video is leading to unprecedented levels of voter interaction and engagement, helping to both drive and reinforce major fundraising drives, empowering voters. This helps in part to explain why this election is setting all-time records in small donations online.
The trend is strongest in the two candidates that have the largest presence online: Barack Obama and Ron Paul.
Consider these examples:
- Ron Paul's largest fundraising day was December 16, when he raised $6,043,022.96 in 59,170 donations. In the week leading up to the 16th, views spiked at an average of 69,908, up from an average of 40,775 the seven days previous.
- Paul's second-largest fundraising day was November 5, when he raised $3,994,713.65 in 38,905 donations. The seven days preceding November 5th saw an average of 76,098 views, compared to an average of 44,803 per day the seven days before that.
- Barack Obama raised $7.5 million in the 36 hours after Super Tuesday, despite his mixed results that day. Perhaps his huge surge in video views and comments in the days leading up to Super Tuesday, driven largely by the celebrity-laden "Yes We Can" music video, played a role (below).
- Barack Obama raised $32 million in January; the stir created by the 1984 Apple spoof, which peaked in December, perhaps played a role.
The all-time leaders in terms of views are Barack Obama and Ron Paul, respectively, followed by Hillary Clinton (see chart below). The key to their success may be the viral element they accidentally harnessed of people spreading the word and linking to their videos (88% of Obama's $32 million raised in January was donated online, possibly a symptom of this). Another key is probably demographics, as Hillary and McCain tend to poll well for older voters.
A note on methodology:
We tracked the candidates' main video channels using TubeMogul's third-party tracking for the numbers and our custom grouping feature to aggregate those numbers.
- Barack Obama is comprised of his campaign's YouTube, MySpace, Brightcove channels, as well as the independent "Yes We Can" channel.
- Ron Paul is comprised of his campaign's YouTube and MySpace channels.
- Hillary Clinton is comprised of her campaign's YouTube and MySpace channels.
- John McCain is comprised of his YouTube and Veoh channels.
Works Cited
The New York Times
RonPaulGraphs
TechCrunch
and of course, TubeMogul and our partners.
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