In the last month, from September 23 to October 23, Barack Obama’s campaign has posted 256 videos to its YouTube channel, garnering 22.4 million views, according to the video tracking service OneLoad.com (formerly part of TubeMogul). Mitt Romney’s campaign has posted just 44 videos, earning just 4.7 million views. On a per video basis, Romney is getting slightly more views on average, 107,000 to 88,000. But in terms of reaching voters and supporters, the Obama campaign is trouncing Romney on YouTube.
This matters for several reasons. The first is money. While it costs the Obama campaign something to produce all these videos, the costs of distribution are close to zero. Exactly four years ago on this site, I asked Democratic strategist Joe Trippi to estimate the value of Obama’s YouTube videos, in terms of how many TV advertising dollars it would take to obtain that many individual views multiplied by video length. Using an average media market, Trippi’s Obama’s remarks from the last debate on Israel; this because I’m signed up on the campaign’s Jewish Americans list. A glance at the campaign’s YouTube channel also finds several recent videos focused on such narrow topics as promoting the Spanish band Mana’s endorsement of Obama. Like the Obama email strategy that I wrote about earlier this week, on YouTube and on the ground, they’re clearly trying to leave no stone unturned, no target untapped.