Australian Google election portal changes campaign advertising

In contrast to past and ongoing elections in Canada and elsewhere, official party videos are receiving large numbers of viewers leading up to Australia’s federal election November 24), due in large part to Google testing out a federal election portal (“Australia Votes”). The portal includes Youtube links for the main parties.http://www.google.com.au/election2007/. The major party leaders have produced campaign videos explicitly for Google and Youtube’s http://www.youtube.com/australiavotes election portals.

Daily views for all the political parties since October 14th have averaged 12, 471 views, topping out at 27, 643 views on October 17th, the date that Labour released a slew of campaign ads. On average, over half of the daily total views (6332) went to the Labour party, while John Howard’s Liberal party saw on average 4137 views per day.

Unofficial videos, however, continue to dominate viewership in the Australian election. In just one week a parody Chinese communist style video staring Labour leader Kevin Rudd received a huge audience of 55,573 views.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptccZze7VxQ

Another unofficial Youtube video showing the Labour leader eating ear wax from his ear while in the legislature (widely reported in the international press) has received over 200,000 views in a week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ipvdBnU8F8