Party Leaders on YouTube from May 25 to June 1, 2007

Highlights of past week:

Dion's leadership dominates partisan videos on YouTube: Harper's leadership goes unquestioned by top viewed videos for month of May

Liberal and Tory Bloggers both hype same Dion Speech/Video

Low Tech Liberals Out duel Tories on YouTube?: Tory ads flop online

• For the month of May 60% of YouTube videos that focused on Dion's leadership were uploaded by either partisan bloggers (Liberals and Tories) or the political parties (again, Liberals and Tories). By contrast 0% of videos focusing on the prime minister were uploaded by the aforementioned 'partisans'.
• While the media focused on the Young Liberal's video ads this past week (two of the three ads receiving approximately 4000 views for the first 48 hours), the top ranked video for Dion, a video from the federal Liberals uploaded to YouTube on May 26, received over 2500 views.

The video shows Dion at a town hall style meeting responding to a question about the Liberals record on climate change. Curiously two top bloggers, Jason Cherniak, for the Liberals, and the Tory blogger Catherine McMillan both promoted the video on their blogs. Cherniak claimed that the video offered a compelling argument in favour of the Liberal position, however, YouTube statistics show that over 50% of the views for this video come from the Tory blogger Catherine McMillan, compared to only 14% for Cherniak's Liberal affiliated blog.

• Both the Young Liberal's three videos and the hand held low tech video recording of Stephan Dion's speech (discussed above) received three to five times as many views as the more professional advertisement ("Dion not a leader - Senate) uploaded by the Conservative party on May 29.

Party Leaders on YouTube from May 25 to June 1, 2007

Stephen Harper

Stephane Dion

Jack Layton

Gilles Duceppe

Elizabeth May