How much is YouTube worth to a presidential campaign? To start to answer this question, I asked the folks at TubeMogul, whose charts have been powering our YouTube charts for the last 18 months, if they would run a simple calculation for us. If you take each one of Barack Obama’s more than 1,650 videos on YouTube, and multiply its individual number of views with its length, how much time would that be in total? Same for McCain.
David Burch of TubeMogul ran the numbers, and here’s what he came up with:
The total in absolute time (views * video length):
Obama 14,548,809.05 hours; McCain 488,093.01 hours
That’s a lot of free video! Even if people don’t watch all of a video (and TubeMogul suggests that a full view doesn’t necessarily mean someone has paid attention the whole way through, which is common sense), the YouTube platform has been a huge tool for distributing the campaigns’ video messages. How much would it cost to buy this much airtime if you were purchasing TV time? Joe Trippi kindly ran some back-of-the-envelope math for me. He wrote:
It’s around $46,893,000 dollars. Math works like this. The City of Denver has 1.3million TV households — to buy those households costs $350 per point ($350 to reach one percent of those households) to reach 100% of those 1.3 million for 30 seconds would cost $35,000. So to reach them all for an hour would be 120 X $35,000 = $4,200,000. To get to 14.5 viewing hours you multiply $4,200,000 X 14.5 = $60,900,000.
Now to take out the 300,000 of the 1.3million to get this really down to 14.5 million hours. 300,000 is 23% of 1.3 million — so we reduce $60,900,000 by 23% = $46,893,000. We could have gotten rid of the 300,000 using the same method at the beginning to make this easier to understand — but it is going to be around $46 million.
According to that rough approach, McCain’s much smaller YouTube footprint might be valued at about $1.5 million.
Trippi makes one additional point. We’re not comparing apples to apples, since a TV ad is a form of push media that interrupts people’s attention, while web video is much more a pull media, where we choose to watch. As he said, “The finer point would be that people were not forced to watch these — they wanted to watch them — they chose to watch them.”
I’m not even counting the value of having more than 100,000 channel subscribers, though if you wanted to compare them to cable channel subscribers, that might be worth at least a couple dollars a month to a campaign. Nor am I counting all the voter-generated YouTube videos on behalf of each candidate, which also clearly have a value. But $46 million is nothing to sneer at.
Can any candidate afford to ignore YouTube in the future?
October 24, 2008