After my second video for Huffington Post’s Off the Bus project, I was really starting to wonder just what kind of market for political video there is online. (I have always been wondering, but now I’m really wondering, you see.) I figured there was a niche, but I was worried that it was pretty narrow, and that it might have already been filled by YouTube’s political darling, James Kotecki, who has managed to collect 3,538 subscribers to his YouTube channel and regularly gets several thousand views per video. Not to discount the quality of his work, I think the key to his success (and attendant media attention) is in his being first: it’s not like he had any particular training or actual political experience that made him a better analyst of what makes good political YouTube video than any of us Young Democrats who made 2006 our Year of YouTube, but he saw an unfulfilled opportunity and he produced consistent work where no one else did.

Three thousand subscribers doesn’t make him a juggernaut on YouTube, of course, because that demographic seems to prefer, well, chicks. Chicks in their pajamas, hanging out in their bedrooms, spilling their guts in a manner that is basically better suited for a “Friends Only” LiveJournal, but is enhanced by the tantalizing notion to tens of thousands of internet dorks that they have a fantasy online girlfriend — or at least might catch a glimpse of something racy. That is what garners tens of thousands of subscribers.

Okay, forgive me for my terribly misogynist use of the word “chick.” I’m just a little bitter. And for the record, you needn’t be flaunting the sexy to amass a huge following, so long as you’re actually funny and put in a lot of production value. But if you want to succeed on effortless crap, you’d better be nubile.

Anyway, back on topic, Kotecki’s work (”First!”) made him a must-consult resource for political online video, and he even landed a real, actual, full-time job based on it, producing a new regular feature for Politico.com. He is the, uh, “anchor” for PlaybookTV, a video companion to their breaking political news column. Since I’m lazy and don’t always check the Politico website, I subscribed to their YouTube channel so I can get updated to new episodes. And after a while, the numbers showing up on YouTube made me curious — and made me feel a little bit better about the pathetic showing from Huffington Post.

See, after a few weeks of this PlaybookTV feature, it seemed that James’s new videos on YouTube were only getting a dozen or two views a day, maxing out around a hundred views per episode, a paltry sum compared to his previous success. Is political video just that boring?

Psyche! That’s just because I had the wrong YouTube channel (damnit, would you people quit making so many channels?). The dedicated PlaybookTV channel has almost 500 subscribers, and each episode is getting 300-400 views within a couple days, several hundred over a couple weeks, and the real breakout episodes get a couple-few thousand hits. Still, hardly competing with buxom babes.*

Over at HuffPo/OTB, we’re in the same ballpark. My three-part video series on Bill Richardson has averaged only 139 views, having published last Thursday, Friday, and yesterday. (The second episode fared best with 237 views, perhaps because viewers were concerned about Bill’s “lonely dog,” but the third episode, which got posted on the top of the OTB page and cross-posted to the HuffPo’s main Politics page, has a laughable 64 views, even with its wildly-exaggerated headline about Richardson’s cabinet selection process.) My Rudy Giuliani video rose to about 300 views within the first week and has leveled off at 397.

Grayson’s video of Hillary Clinton’s visit last week is up to 332 views in 4 days, but sadly most of those hits seem to be coming from cross-posts to her blog, to Blog for Democracy, and to some really sketchy fashion photographer’s MySpace page — the video view count was already in the hundreds by the time it got published on OTB. However her first and second videos are up to 523 and 601 views apiece, with 120-130 direct click-throughs from Huffington Post, so it’s not all a crying shame. Still, Karen Beninato’s videos for OTB are lingering at 105 views for a 3-week-old video and 55 views for this weekend’s piece about the Obama-thon, which is otherwise getting massive coverage.

Was the YouTube political journalism just a flash in the pan?

* This is where the asterisk comes in and a totally unrelated story emerges (for next time) about the Politico, because the numbers for PlaybookTV are totally misrepresented. Like Huffington Post plans to do (and Slate, CBS News, and Barack Obama have done), the Politico has gone to using Brightcove for their video hosting, so YouTube views are no real indication of the success of Kotecki’s new gig. Unfortunately, it’s a neat trick to figure out just how well the Brightcove videos are doing for the Politico, because it’s not at all clear where they’re storing their videos, and I can’t be sure I’m seeing accurate playcounts.

Browsing through the list of news channels on Brightcove reveals no mention of the Politico or Playbook TV. Using the terribly-hard-to-see-cause-it’s-the-same-color-as-the-background search window at the top of the screen isn’t much help either: “playbooktv” takes you to a channel of the same name that Politico used for only one video, and “politicoplaybook” is a more fleshed-out channel that apparently died another sudden death on October 12. The views on that channel are also down in the negligible single digits, which is hard to believe for any content on the front page of the Politico. There’s no clear way to glean the true location of Politico’s Brightcove channel from the numbers hidden in the embed, permanlink, and RSS codes in the player menu — while the dead PlaybookTV channel has a normal looking RSS with its channel number right in it, the RSS provided by the new player on Politico.com has a more untraceable bcpid number that has no correlation to squat I can browse to. And they sure aren’t making themselves known by searching for plain old “politico.”

Are viewership numbers such a guarded trade secret? Or are they even more depressed by their wasted efforts than Grayson and I are and hiding as best they can? Weird.

Coming next: Politico abandons UGC.



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