YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States

“Viral videos” – online video clips that gain widespread popularity when they are passed from person to person via email, instant messages and media sharing websites – can exert a strong influence on election campaigns. Unfortunately, there has been almost no systematic empirical research on the factors that lead viral videos to spread across the Internet and permeate into the dominant political discourse. This paper provides an initial assessment of the complex relationships that drive viral political videos by assessing the interplay between audience size, blog discussion, campaign statements and mainstream media coverage of the most popular online political video of the 2008 campaign – will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” music video. Using vector autoregression, I find strong evidence that the relationship between these variables is complex and multi-directional. More specifically, I argue that bloggers and members of the Obama campaign played crucial roles in convincing people to watch the video and in attracting media coverage while journalists had little influence on the levels of online viewership, blog discussion or campaign support. Bloggers and campaign members, in other words, seem to occupy a unique and influential position in determining the whether an online political video goes viral.