Political Attack Ads all the Rage on YouTube: Federal Parties’ Policy Ads Flop

Research at Ryerson University’s Infoscape Research Lab has found that attack ads from the federal parties are up to thirty times more popular than policy focused videos on YouTube.

• Attack ads posted by the Conservative Party of Canada, for example, have averaged over 5000 views. Policy videos uploaded by the Tories on to YouTube, by comparison, averaged only 170 views per video.
• The popularity of attack ads was, however, much less pronounced for Liberal Party videos. Liberal Party attack videos averaged over 2600 views, while policy based videos averaged only 105 views per video.
• The federal NDP and Green parties have not yet posted attack ads on YouTube. The Bloc have restricted their videos to their website. The NDP policy ads have averaged 1491 views, whereas the Green averaged only 84 views per video.

Greg Elmer, Director of the Code Politics project, also noted that the findings mirrored previous research at Infoscape that noted the relative popularity of partisan bloggers videos on YouTube.