You Tube Election Revolution?
by Mark Rhoades
Issue 118 - October 22, 2008

I saw two very funny speeches by Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama speaking to the 63rd Annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner in New York. But I did not attend the dinner or watch it on TV. I watched it in a way that was not possible just four years ago when President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry were the candidates. Instead I watched a video clip of the dinner on You Tube, a venue that did not exist in 2004 but now offers 5 billion videos per month to about 92 million viewers according to SearchEngineWatch.com and comScore. From all internet sources, more than 12 billion videos will be seen this month.

This November will be the first national You Tube election and no one yet knows how this new wild card might affect our voting. I do know that if I were an advisor to the McCain-Palin campaign, I would encourage them to post the Al Smith dinner talk on their web site and send the link to as many email addresses as they have while at the same time asking supporters to forward the link to their own email lists of people on their Christmas card list or fellow members of their, church, temple, club, alumni, and friends. The Smith Dinner video shows Sen. McCain in a very positive and humorous light that he has not had many chances to project before.

On Feb. 15, 2005, three friends who had worked at Pay Pal--Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim—purchased the domain name for You Tube and by late April the first video was posted. By the end of the next month 30,000 viewers per day came to You Tube to see the beta site. In October of that year, a CNN interview with Jon Stewart drew more viewers on You Tube than on CNN itself. By March 2006, viewers were watching 25 million videos per day and new content was coming online at the rate of 20,000 new videos per day. In 2007 when Google purchased You Tube it was the fourth most visited website in the world serving 100 million clips per day.

On broadcast TV and cable, which was the dominant medium in 2004, the Obama-Biden campaign is outspending the McCain-Palin campaign on commercials by about three to one. But no one knows if all that spending by the Obama campaign has reached a point of diminishing return. You Tube on the other hand, is mostly a free medium for users and it has been a great equalizer so far in this campaign with low barriers to entry for political advocates. Also of importance it the fact that You Tube has been an incubator for TV stories that came out on broadcast networks later. You Tube offered videos of the incendiary comments of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Obama’s pastor, many weeks before ABC News picked up the story in March.

What no one can yet measure regarding the impact of You Tube videos on the presidential campaign is how the venue distributes political ideas. People create videos that might be professionally done to broadcast standards, or junk, or anywhere in between. You Tube viewers find them over the transom during searches or because a friend or group has sent them a link. We have no idea how many individual Americans are sending You Tube political links by emails to each other but the numbers are very large if we judge by anecdotal indicators. Partisans on both sides seem to be much better informed on “inside baseball” details of the campaigns that would not have been common knowledge in the pre-You Tube campaign of 2004. In the last two years, the former media stars of broadcast TV and cable have lost a great many viewers to the often better balanced venue of You Tube where people make their own choices about what stories they want to see.

At first, many reporters thought that You Tube was the ideal venue for young liberals. That perception started to change with a July 27, 2007 article in the Tech President Personal Democracy Forum that showed more self-identified Republicans were watching You Tube than Democrats. To be sure, the Republicans were looking at different content, classic movies and TV shows instead of music videos for example. But Republicans were also learning the skills of You Tube production and distribution. How many views can You Tube serve up for a video? Everyone was impressed when the Welsh tenor Paul Potts broke records in 2007 with more than 20 million views if not viewers. Now popular music videos reach more than sixty million views. That’s why the first “Obama Girl” video actually made some sense as a political campaign device since the numbers were large enough to notice. Earlier this year an alternative to You Tube has also been launched called Eyeblast TV. CLICK HERE to see the Eyeblast TV home page. Eyeblast encourages specific conservative content.

You Tube is not the only source of videos on the internet but it is the largest. Last March the Comscore service indicated that American watched 11.5 billion videos that month on all Internet sources and You Tube viewers on average downloaded 50 videos per month. Many people now watch more video on the internet than the do on the older network and cable TV venues. The reason is more choice and better content. Formerly limited to short clips, You Tube has just started offering hour-long TV shows with commercials that are no longer in syndication.

You Tube is the wild card of this election because nobody can measure its impact in persuading and motivating voters who get videos links from their friends. The impact could affect every traditional factor of campaigns from donations to likely voter turnout models. You Tube is not a top down model but a peer to peer model of distribution that has made even minor candidates such as Ron Paul famous among certain segments of viewers. With all the money and a hurricane of factors at the back of Sen. Obama, maybe the You Tube wild card is one reason that Main Stream Media has not yet been able to put the crown on his head. Maybe, just maybe, they no longer have that kind of power.

The fact that You Tube could be an equalizer for candidates who do not have a lot of money could be a hopeful sign. In 1979 when maverick Jane Byrne defeated the Chicago machine for mayor, her campaign budget was only $100,000 for one commercial critical of the lack of effective action by Mayor Michael Bilandic to plow the streets of the city and remove the snow. Four years later her war chest of ten million dollars—100 times her previous budget, could not help her to successfully win re-election even with all the advantages of incumbency. The candidate with the most money has an advantage, but it is not a guarantee of a win. Now in the age of You Tube, we are returning to a time when the right message counts for more than money.

Mark Q. Rhoades is a former state senator and current blogger in Illinois.