Google launches Youtube channel for the Federal Election
Google has launched its official Youtube channel for the Federal Election: Australia votes.
The announcement:
Today, Google is launching a hub for political videos from the 2013 federal election campaign at youtube.com/australiavotes. Curating videos from media, political parties and the YouTube community, the channel is a one-stop shop for Australian voters to watch, share and discuss the videos that are shaping the campaign.
“Two weeks into the campaign, we’ve already had millions of views of election-related videos on YouTube,” said Google spokesperson Johnny Luu. “Australians are increasingly coming online to watch political speeches, interviews, campaign ads and, of course, the occasional gaffe.”
In conjunction with the launch of “Australia Votes”, Google has taken a look at the YouTube presence of the major political parties: Labor, Liberal and the Greens. We compared their official channels’ number of subscribers, number of uploaded videos and the view count of their most popular videos.
The Liberal Party has the highest number of total views, with their most popular video, an animated cartoon titled ‘The Headless Chooks in ‘The Gillard Experiment’, reaching over 400,000 views. It trumps Labor’s ‘Raising the Standards’ video, which calls for a stop to negative politics, with just over 86,000 views. The Greens’ top video, ‘Julia and Tony, stop delaying the inevitable’ on marriage equality, has 13,000 views.
Analysis by Google shows that advocacy organisation GetUp! is Australia’s top political campaigner on YouTube, with more subscribers and total videos views than all three political parties combined. Their top video, “It’s Time” — an appeal for marriage equality — has clocked more than eight million views to date.
“GetUp!’s marriage equality video is easily one of Australia’s top political videos on YouTube of all time. Their success shows that there’s a huge untapped potential to gather a large audience around important political and social issues,” said Luu.
Source: Google media release
