Ahh it’s that time of year: The leaves are starting to change colors, the temperature is cooling, the sun is setting earlier, and the 2012 election is entering its weird, jittery phase when progressives are being straw-polled on Republican candidates and Google is egging on the madness with a new YouTube Politics channel.
YouTube Politics, which went live on Thursday, “will feature the latest campaign ads, parodies, gotchas, and speeches, offering you a 360-view of the election,” according to a blog post from Ramya Raghavan, YouTube News and Politics Manager.
The “campaign ads” promise is most intriguing, as it effectively means Google is baiting campaigns and interest groups to come up with the most viral attack ads, as if they needed any encouragement. Yet no attack ads currently appear on the site. We’ve emailed Google to ask about how these will be filtered and will update when we receive a response.
Aside from taking a page from Anderson Cooper with the whole “360-view” angle, the new website also seeks to provide a running tally of the major Presidential candidates’ popularity in the digital video domain, including a chart showing their total subscribers and views of their campaign videos’ over the past month. (Rick Perry will be pleased to know that his poor debate performances haven’t stopped him from dominating this straw poll, with his slick “Proven Leadership” video boosting him far and ahead of the other candidates, with 905,769 views).
The channel also displays a typically (for YouTube) eclectic mix of the top 5 most-popular political videos every week. The Oct. 5 edition everything from Chris Christie’s defense of comedians who make fun of his weight, to a “Rick Perry Rap,” to Michael Moore’s latest to visit to Occupy Wall Street.
Eventually, it aims to include historical footage as well, based on this trailer, which kicks-off with George H.W. Bush’s infamous “read my lips: no new taxes,” line.
“We wanted to paint a really holistic view for what politics looks like on YouTube,” Ramya Raghavan, YouTube news and politics manager, told POLITICO. “We’re seeing that citizens have an enormous appetite for getting political information online.”
As Politico notes, Google’s increasingly attempted to solidify a position as the dominant digital broadcaster of political content, recently partnering with Fox News for the Sept. 22 Republican Debate in Orlando. Back in 2007, YouTube partnered with CNN for a debate, although CNN executives were wary of the input of videotaped questions from the site’s free-wheeling users.
And yet, as PaidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen points out, as of now, the channel isn’t linking the Presidential candidates’ profiles to anything remotely disparaging or critical of them. She writes:
I’ve asked YouTube whether clicking on a candidate on the site would ever bring up negative videos about that candidate, or videos that reveal a candidate making a gaffe. (In such a case, more views could bring up the candidate’s number of video views, and therefore YouTube Politics ranking, but may not have nothing to do with whether a candidate is performing well). Also, what officially qualifies as a “gaffe”?
Beyond this, there remains the question of how YouTube will manage user submissions to the Politics channel itself: Right now, there’s no obvious option for submitting videos to the page, which instead appears to be aggregating from a variety of sources, including Think Progress.
Also, how would Google respond to those candidates who don’t like the content attached to their names? If recent history has proven any indication, the company is, at the very least, more committed to maintaining the integrity of its algorithms than to satisfying the whims of a disgruntled politician.
