Things have been extremely hectic here at divinity Metrics but we finally got a chance to grab a Coke and sit down and really take a detailed look at what is going on with the presidential candidate field for 2008. As you all know, we released Scope 2 a few weeks back that added YouTube metrics to our cross platform analytics suite. Scope 2 provides some of the most advanced features for doing marketing, advertising, and content syndication research. So we were really excited to unleash all this power on the 2008 candidates and have a whole slew of blog posts lined up that will take a deep look into the issues, traffic, trends, and other important metrics that paint a picture about what candidates truly stand for and will allow us to make some interesting prediction.One of the areas this post will cover is the total views each candidate is receiving vs. how many videos they have posted. This is important because it really tells us the true traction of candidate, and in many ways, also measures the true popularity of a candidate. For example, let’s take a look at Ron Paul. Ron Paul is clearly the leader on the Republican side with over 3 million views but has only uploaded 50 videos so far. So the views per video is about 77,000. Regardless of the issues and what he stand for, Ron Paul has done a good job of honing his message and really positioning the right videos to appeal to his base. Out of his published videos, 1.25 million views alone are viewed by the 18-24 age demographic and 1.37 million views from the 25-34 age demographic. On the gender front, Ron Paul had a following of 87% male and 13% female.Ron Paul aside, let’s take look at the views/video ratio of other Republican candidates as outlined in Figure 1: 

 On the democratic front, Barack Obama clearly has the most views on YouTube with over 3 milion views. But his campaign has uploaded over 180 videos on YouTube. Hillary Clinton on the other hand has total views of about 2 million but has only uploaded 69 videos. Hillary Clinton has about 33,000 views per video, nearly double to that of Barack Obama with about 18,000 views per video. Refer to Figure 2. for complete details for all the Democratic candidates:  So while comparing the total views, it is necessary to take into account how many videos each campaign has uploaded as well as the views per video. If you see just the numbers of views, sure Barack Obama is the favorite on YouTube, but if you take into account the views per video, Hillary Clinton beats the pack by a huge margin. Over the next year, we will be doing in-depth posts about each candidate, party positions, and analyzing demographics.