Limitations

This study focuses on views to measure the success of a video. This measure can be very limiting because it doesn’t provide information on who is watching the video, whether the viewer already supports the candidate, if the video had an impact on the viewer’s opinion of the respective candidate, or how the viewer found the video. Further studies tracking where viewers are finding these videos would be very useful to candidates. Are there specific blogs that help boost views of a particular video? Do certain social networks work better than others? By creating a crawler that can track these links, a map could potentially be formed to help answer these questions.

Analysis and Recommendations

This study has charted the types of videos each candidate has posted and how many views these videos have received. Using this data, some theories can be made about the types of YouTube campaigns each candidate has been running.

Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain appear to be posting videos in a manner that reflects their traditional media campaign. Their primary focuses are commercials and news clips, which aren’t new content specifically made for YouTube. In general, they are taking positive messages from the media and posting them on YouTube, perhaps as an attempt to amplify the positive things being said about them.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has taken a slightly different approach. His dominate video type, speeches, are almost exclusively created by his campaign for posting on YouTube. This has lead to Obama posting multiple videos every day. Rather than simply reflecting what is being shown on traditional media outlets, he is creating a large amount of content that can only be viewed on his channel. This encourages viewers to return to his channels to watch videos and gives a perspective that traditional media outlets don’t offer. Additionally, supporters can follow Obama on the campaign trail. Rather than posting content that has already been release through other outlets, Obama appears to be creating a community with his YouTube campaign. This appears to be a more effective way to run a YouTube campaign than Hillary and McCain’s strategies.

Obama’s community approach has been very effective, but there are many other factors that can explain his amazing success with YouTube. One explanation for his success is simply that his message resonates with younger citizens – the primary users of YouTube. Additionally, Obama’s campaign has been very active in using other social networks to share YouTube videos. A study on how each candidate’s videos are being spread throughout these other social would help better understand Obama’s overall e-campaign.

Conclusion

To date, the three candidates’ videos have garnered over 50 million views. This number clearly shows people are using YouTube to engage in politics. Moreover, Obama’s strategy of engaging voters with content that can only be found on YouTube has proven to be successful. This suggests that YouTube has potential to become a great new medium for politics and government as a whole.

However, posting videos doesn’t mean users will watch. Obama has shown that with the right techniques, including extensive use of social networks outside of YouTube, people will view a candidate’s videos. However, simply posting videos that can be seen on traditional media sources doesn’t appear to be very effective. The right strategy is very important if a candidate wishes to run a successful YouTube campaign.

What this means for civic engagement as a whole is hard to say. This study has only looked at a small portion of what is necessary to say anything conclusive about YouTube campaigns. What can be said is Barack Obama has been very successful on YouTube. Will Obama use this new medium as well as Kennedy used television? That question will be answered in November.