The Presidential Candidates on YouTube: Your Interactive Dashboard

 

In this week's The Week magazine, there is a note: "YouTube videos mentioning Barack Obama or John McCain were viewed 2.3 billion times, according to media measurement firm TubeMogul."

Regular readers of The Measurement Standard will recall that KDPaine & Partners has been conducting an ongoing study of the YouTube presence of the presidential hopefuls since January, 2007. This research has been tracking the views and ratings of all YouTube videos that mention a candidate's name and "New Hampshire" in the title, description or tags. (KDP&P is located in New Hampshire, and the Live Free Or Die state is very proud of its first-in-the-nation presidential primary.) You can read our earlier, pre-primary, article about these results here in TMS, and a follow-up post here, in Katie Paine's blog.

KDPaine & Partners maintains an online interactive dashboard of this data, which anybody can use (URL: http://www.diydashboard.com, User: youtube, Password: kdpaine). I encourage you to head on over there and mess around with the data. Help yourself to a few charts. 

Here, for instance, is a chart from that dashboard showing total views per candidate from Jan 1, 2007 to Election Day, 2008 (click on the chart to see it bigger):

As you may recall (and as this chart demonstrates) New Hampshire was strongly enamored of Ron Paul; the popularity of his videos during the primary was so great that it shows up here as if he was a major contender in the entire race.

If we look at the data for just the three months before the election, the ghost of Ron Paul still lingers, but it is clear how the overall landscape changed later in the race (Sarah Palin was not included in this study.) Click on the chart to see it bigger:

--Bill Paarlberg