To those that watch a little too much web video (as if that were possible), it should come as no surprise that McCain has been getting some rough treatment on YouTube. Just type "John McCain" into YouTube's search box and you'll find a litany of user-generated attacks. So while some of these clips have been viewed millions of times online, it looks like all this frenetic anti-McCain web video activity is showing the first signs of manifesting as a narrative in the media. From a piece out today in the Los Angeles Times entitled, "McCain's Web gap is showing,"
The presumed Republican presidential nominee is taking a serious drubbing on YouTube, the most popular video-sharing service on the Internet and the virtual town square for millions of new young voters...
Six of the top 10 videos returned by a "John McCain" YouTube search Thursday pegged the 71-year-old as inconsistent, extreme, wooden or a combination of the three. (The one clearly favorable piece came from the McCain campaign and focused on his Navy service.)
Here's a little taste of what McCain has working against him. "McCain's YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare," viewed over one and a half million times:
While the web video audience is relatively small, it's reach can suddenly explode when synergies develop with traditional media outlets. Now I have no way of knowing whether these McCain videos will continue to get this kind of attention, but as the Reverend Wright and Pastor Hagee controversies have taught us, it can be important to keep your finger on the web video pulse to, at the very least, have a sense of what may be the next emergent online scoop.
If you want to better understand the world of web video, check out our memo here. We've also done a lot of work on other new tools which I'll be discussing in future posts. Stay tuned.
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