Politics’ Attention in YouTube Justified (Sort of)
Just in time for the American mid term elections, HitWise has release some interested data on how traffic to and from YouTube is doing. It turns out:
YouTube accounted for 63% more visits to Politics websites last week compared with one month ago. YouTube sent 88% more of its own traffic to websites in the Politics category last week compared with one month ago.
While there is plenty of things on television (read: the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, any gaffs by George W. Bush) that are grist for the political mill, it certainly provides food for thought in terms of the potential ROI in any viral media campaign — and justifies some of the attention, at least, to the time politicos have been investing in creating their own YouTube videos.
Of course, whether or not increased traffic actually translates into any actual change has yet to be seen; people who were interested in those videos may have been individuals whose political affiliations have already been set, and not undecided.
Thanks for picking up on our post about YouTube, social media and the US midterm election. You are absolutely right – whether this will impact behaviour is another story all together. Measuring ROI of social media marketing will be tricky.
Thanks for popping by Heather Hopkins (of Hitwise!) — social media represents some great benefits from a traffic point of view — conversion to actual results, and measuring those results will be one of the greatest challenges, I think.
Some of the results may be surprising as well.
A bit of a pedestrian example is that Digg traffic rarely translate into Adwords clicks.
If Hitwise ever has any new metrics on conversion data, don’t hesitate to let us know!
Cheers
tony.