Australians are increasingly coming online to watch political speeches, interviews, campaign ads and, of course, the occasional gaffe. Just two weeks into the campaign, we’ve already had millions of views of election-related videos on YouTube.
To make it easier to discover and watch videos about the Federal Election, we’ve created a YouTube Elections Hub at youtube.com/AustraliaVotes. Curating videos across YouTube, the channel is a one-stop shop for Australian voters to watch, share, and discuss the videos that are shaping the campaign.
With the launch of Australia Votes, we wanted to take stock of how campaign politics are increasingly being played out on YouTube:
Of the major parties, the Liberal Party’s official channel has the highest number of total views on YouTube, 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.
However, the top political campaigner on YouTube is not a political party, but advocacy organisation GetUp!. With more subscribers and video views than all three parties combined, their top video, ‘It’s Time’ — an appeal for marriage equality — has clocked more than eight million views to date.
With millions of Australians visiting YouTube every month to be entertained and informed, GetUp’s success shows there’s still a huge untapped potential to gather a large audience around important political and social issues.
Posted by Johnny Luu, Communication and Public Affairs Manager, Google Australia
