Politics & Elections Blog: The 2010 election on YouTube: By the numbers

The 2010 election on YouTube: By the numbers

Monday, November 1, 2010

(Cross-posted from YouTube's CitizenTube blog)

In these 2010 midterm elections, campaigns, voters, and interest groups have continued to innovate new ways to share their political opinions on YouTube. Because YouTube is a platform where anyone can post and share videos globally, you’ve made this platform the vanguard of the political media discussion. Some of these efforts to influence the political dialog on YouTube were more successful than others. Today, we’re sharing who emerged on top of the YouTube elections heap - and we’re going strictly by the numbers.

The top 10 most-viewed videos, sourced from all videos categorized as “News & Politics" on YouTube, are a mixed bag of official campaign videos, user-generated content and videos from interest groups:

1. Congressman Assaults Student on Sidewalk

2. We Are Better than That

3. America Rising - An Open Letter to Democrat Politicians

4. President Obama, No One is Laughing in Arizona

5. Language

6. Brewer to Obama: Warning Signs are not Enough

7. Those Voices Don’t Speak for the Rest of Us

8. FCINO: Fiscal Conservative in Name Only

9. Governor Christie Responds to Teacher During Town Hall

10. Arizona Sing-A-Long: Read Immigration Law!

Interestingly, every video in the top ten comes from the Republicans, which is quite a departure from 2008. In addition, immigration was an extremely hot topic on YouTube this year - three out of ten of the most-viewed videos are about the Arizona immigration law (2 came from AZ Governor Jan Brewer).

Now, let’s take a look specifically at the 450 candidates for public office who registered for official Politician channels on YouTube this fall. Here’s a rundown of the top 10 most-viewed Politician channels on YouTube in the last month:

Leading the pack is Christine O’Donnell whose “I’m You” video inspired hundreds of thousands of views... and quite a few parodies. Here's the original:

YouTube Insight allows us to see where the view counts were coming for any individual video. For example, parodies of O’Donnell’s “I’m You” video (like the Gregory Brothers’ “Songify This," above) received millions more views than O’Donnell’s original campaign video nationally, but Insight shows us that O’Donnell still received more views in the state of Delaware than any parody video.

Similarly, the memorable “Why” video from the #2 politician on the list, Kentucky Senate candidate Jack Conway, shows that he too, did an effective job of targeting the voters in his state - even though the video went viral nationally.