The Danger of Using YouTube Views as a Metric

I’m a big fan of the Facebook, MySpace and Technorati stats TechPresident is keeping on the 2008 Presidential candidates. These stats are a good measure of the amount of traction each candidate is getting in those communities and on the web overall.

The YouTube stats, however, are really deceptive due to the vastly different ways candidates are using YouTube. As an example, here is the chart showing YouTube views for each Democrat’s main channel.

Pretty clear, right? Obama leads and Edwards recently overtook Hillary for second place. Edwards is getting more buzz for his online videos than Hillary.

Actually, no. Edwards’ numbers are artificially inflated because he is using YouTube as the primary player for all of his videos on his website. Meanwhile, Obama is using Brightcove to play videos on his website while Hillary is using what looks to be a player created in house.

So we’re comparing apples and oranges here: all of Edwards’ video plays are being compared to maybe 1/3 or 1/2 of Obama’s and Hillary’s views. I’d venture to guess that in terms of actual views Edwards is pretty firmly in third place.

As an aside, earlier in the campaign the Clinton campaign was slow to post videos to YouTube, hoping to make people come to their site to view all of her videos. In response, Patrick Ruffini started downloading Clinton’s videos and posting them to YouTube in an effort to divert traffic. Ruffini (and others) probably cost Hillary’s YouTube channel 400,000+ views by doing this.

The Clinton campaign has caught on and now appears to be driving traffic to YouTube by linking to the YouTube version of the video right on their site. You can see an example here. I don’t remember seeing this before.

Fred Thompson disclosure.