2025 is Australia’s ‘YouTube election’

On the eve of the final week of the 2025 election campaign, Labor’s national secretary Paul Erickson warned the party’s supporters in an email that they were “entering the most dangerous period of the campaign”.

Erickson was asking for half a million in donations to help in a “high-stakes digital auction” — specifically, for spiking YouTube advertising costs. A few days prior, the Liberal-backed Advance group blasted out an email boasting about how many views it got on one of its campaigns on YouTube. 

Since the 2000s, elections have often been associated with an ascendant, influential technology that played a significant role in the contest: from the 2007 Google election to 2022’s TikTok election. 

The 2025 Australian federal election’s platform du jour has gotten less attention because it’s not a new thing. In fact, it predates most of its competitors (it’s older than some of the people who will vote this time around). But in the 2025 federal election, the steady, safe Goliath of internet video, YouTube, has grown to play a role so all-encompassing that it’s hard to comprehend and easy to miss. YouTube didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Australians watch more YouTube than anything else online

YouTube has been a digital juggernaut for decades. It had already reached two billion daily views by its 5th birthday in 2010, and then had one billion users five years later. Having turned 20 just two weeks ago, YouTube has been a presence for so long, in fact, that it’s easy to miss how it has continued to grow in size and influence.

Google reckons more than 20 million Australians watch YouTube. More important than how many Aussies watch it is the amount of it they watch. It’s a lot.

YouTube is the second most visited website after Google, according to third-party analytics services Semrush and SimilarWeb. The same data also says it is by far the website with the longest average time per visit. Put these two numbers together, and it shows that Australians collectively spend more time on YouTube than anywhere else on the internet.  

Naturally, political parties, groups and candidates want to go where the voters are — and this has been reflected in their growing reliance on YouTube this election. 

More money spent on YouTube election ads than ever before

This election has marked a new high in YouTube electoral advertising. Last election, Google reported roughly $11.5 million of advertising on its platforms during all but the final week of the campaign. This election, the number over the same period has grown to $13.9 million. (This is in about the same ballpark as expenditure on the other major digital advertising platform offered by Meta.) 

And out of all of the places that Google serves ads — meaning YouTube, Google search ads and individual website ads placed by Google — political advertisers are leaning even more heavily on YouTube: in 2022’s election, 86% of the ads were on YouTube. In 2025, it’s been 96%.

Much like Meta or many of the streaming platforms, Google gives advertisers an incredible ability to micro-target specific voters using a variety of categories: by demographic (like age, gender, income, parental status), by geography, by their interactions with Google (like what YouTube videos they watch or what they search) and by using data that advertisers supply themselves. Google gives some transparency into what political ads are being shown, how often, and how much they cost, as well as some information on which locations’ users they’re being shown to, but beyond that, the public has little idea about how these election ads are targeted.

Founder of Australian digital advertising monitoring firm Adgile, Shaun Lohman, says he’s seen a drastic increase in sophistication in how political parties are using YouTube’s advertising since the last campaign.

He says Australia’s 2022 election YouTube advertisements followed UK politics’ approach, where television ads were reused on YouTube to try to reach people who weren’t watching TV. This year, Lohman said, Australian parties, groups and candidates are following the US approach.

“That means hyper-targeted, delivering to specific people in specific electorates, and also changing the message and delivering a targeted version of that message to those people,” he said. 

Then there’s another big category of content: organic content, or, in layman’s terms, the stuff that you post for free instead of paying to show. What’s incredible is just how many different forms of content are captured on YouTube. 

YouTube has grown from where videos end up to where they start

You know how your perception of someone is often frozen in time from the moment you met them? For some people — occasionally myself — I still catch myself thinking of YouTube as the home of cat videos, movie bloopers and parkour accidents. But during the 20 years of YouTube, improvements in smartphones and mobile connectivity, as well as the growth of smart TVs and COVID-19’s changes to consumption habits, have transformed it into something greater than that. 

Every time a new format has come along, YouTube has swallowed it. Podcasts? They’re on YouTube now, too, and much more discoverable, thanks to the platform’s algorithm. Live-streaming was a comfortable fit on the Google video platform. Once TikTok proved that people wanted short, algorithmically selected videos, YouTube Shorts was a no-brainer. YouTube is synonymous with TV too, now, with more people watching YouTube on their TV than on their phones. The Verge’s David Pierce summed it up in a title: ‘YouTube is everything and everything is YouTube’.

YouTube has served many purposes in elections. It’s for election ads that people can share with their friends and networks. It’s for clips of traditional television broadcasts: highlights and lowlights in Parliaments, gotcha moments in interviews.

What’s changing is how YouTube has leapt from being the place where video created for other platforms ends up to the place where video content goes first. 

Let’s take one of the most high-profile moments of the election cycle: the leaders debates. The ABC’s televised debate was live-streamed on YouTube, getting a quarter of a million views. Then the full debate video was published as a standalone on YouTube. Recaps and clips of the debate were cut up and published as standalone videos. Creators — your FriendlyJordies, Juice Medias, Avi Yeminis, etc — make their own, original content in reaction. Finally, some of those moments were run as election ads by the campaigns. It’s nose-to-tail content consumption, all home on YouTube. 

Even creators who you might associate more closely with other formats are leaning on YouTube. One of the breakout stars of the 2025 election campaign, Punter’s Politics’ Konrad Benjamin, has grown a significant YouTube following, even though many people would have mostly seen him on other platforms. 

The rare chance to spend a long time with someone

One of the most tantalising benefits of YouTube is that it’s geared towards allowing long-form video. Unlike the splices of videos put on TikTok or grabs in television news, YouTube is one of the few places on the internet that caters towards people spending a long time with someone. This means that YouTube audiences have particularly strong connections to their favourite creators — something that politicians are able to tap into by appearing on their channels. 

One of the most-watched interviews of the entire Australian federal election campaign was Anthony Albanese speaking with Ethan Marrell, who runs one of the country’s most popular YouTube accounts, Ozzy Man Reviews.

Having built up 6.2 million subscribers for doing ocker Australian commentary over video compilations of things like attractive Mexican television weather hosts or animals fighting, his video “Aussie Prime Minister Anthony Albanese discusses global issues at the pub” is a pretty big departure from his usual content.

From what we can tell from the outside, it appears to have been a big hit for the prime minister’s campaign: the interview, styled as a casual chat over a beer, has been viewed 240,000 times and has more than 18,000 likes. The comments appear mostly positive, too: “This type of discourse is sorely missing from public life. Not only getting to see politicians as people, but being able to hear the reasoning behind their decisions and their beliefs,” reads one of the top comments.

Swinburne University’s chair of media and communications, Professor Dan Golding, said that appearances like Albanese’s on Ozzy Man Reviews or Peter Dutton on businessman Mark Bouris’ channel (twice during the campaign!) are “significant”. He explained that there’s a value in being able to reach such a large number of people who are unlikely to be highly politically engaged, while being primed to accept it positively due to the association with a YouTuber that they trust. 

“With this massive audience that’s invisible to a lot of people, this is where a lot of people are going to get some of their exposure to political content,” he said. 

(A momentary digression here: digital metrics are very difficult to compare because, counterintuitively, they are not universal. For example, a view is not always a view. On YouTube, a view is widely believed to be when someone watches 30 seconds or more. On Facebook, it’s three seconds now. On TikTok or X? Any moment that a video is seen by a user, even if they are scrolling past and only see it on their screens for 0.3 of a second, a view is counted.) 

I’m going to be upfront and say that my gut — based on what we know officially and my intuition from watching the dynamics of internet culture — tells me that a YouTube view feels more meaningful in terms of influence than other views because it means someone has absorbed more of it. Or to put it in terms of this election, if I were a candidate, I would trade a YouTube view for a TikTok view any day. This should give you a sense of why I think YouTube has been influential, even if its videos might not reach the mind-boggling numbers of other platforms. 

I even believe the influence of YouTube continues off-platform. Many of the tropes and formats of the creator internet that have been adopted by the campaigns were created or honed on YouTube.

On Valentine’s Day this year, Albanese posted a video across social media platforms showing him, dressed in a polo, chinos and sneakers, sitting next to his fiancée Jodie Haydon and their dog Toto. The pair were prompted with questions about their relationship that they answered simultaneously, such as “who reached out first” or “who dresses the best”. Even though it was posted to Instagram and TikTok, as well as YouTube shorts, it was undeniably a YouTube-influenced video, with roots in the family vlogging culture that spawned on Google’s video platform in the 2010s (but has spread across the internet). It’s the 2025 version of the glossy magazine profile or softball television interviews of the past — except it all happens on the campaign’s terms and on YouTube. 

This election has been given plenty of labels: the influencer election, the TikTok election, the AI slop or brain rot election, and the podcast election. All of these are true and important trends, and if you want to tell me they’re more defining than YouTube, I won’t argue too much. My case is that YouTube captures all of these trends and more. 

It’s only just getting started

I’ve been mulling over 2025 being the “YouTube election” since the start of the campaign. I didn’t suspect it early because I’m particularly prescient, but because smarter people than I have pointed out all the ways that YouTube is swallowing just about everything. Australian elections would be no different, I surmised.  

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had another realisation. We might be at peak Australian election YouTube for now, but it might not be the peak for long. 

When I was in the Philippines over the summer, I visited a museum dedicated to the country’s current president, Bongbong Marcos. I was surprised to see that his YouTube channel was highlighted as a significant factor in the scion’s rise to the presidency in 2022. Screens showed family vlogs and weekly addresses that had been broadcast to his 2.7 million followers. (I only discovered later that experts also believed that there was an influential pro-Bongbong disinformation campaign on YouTube.) 

Compared with this, it feels like Australian political use of YouTube as a platform — as a theory of communication — is in its infancy. Albanese’s personal YouTube account has just shy of 14,000 subscribers. It’s posted just eight YouTube videos this year (although it has published more than 100 YouTube Shorts, many of which appear to be cross-posted across other platforms like TikTok and Instagram). Dutton has just 1,580 subscribers and hasn’t posted a YouTube video in 2025.

The fact that these numbers remain so small despite the enormous significance of the rest of YouTube is a reminder of just how much low-hanging fruit there is to use the platform more in the future. Or, for a forward-thinking politician — and perhaps even a prime ministerial hopeful — an obvious opportunity to seize. There’s a path for a future prime minister who doesn’t just start posting short video content six months before an election (as both candidates did this time), but one who is is truly a creator — in spirit and output — who takes full advantage of the platform to create a deep relationship with their supporters.

The same goes for third-party groups, too: early in the election campaign, UTS lecturer and political sociologist Dr Mark Riboldi said only one group — Advance — was taking YouTube seriously.

It’s foolish to assume that anything in technology will be the same or continue on its current trajectory in three years, or whenever the next election will be. Three elections ago, TikTok didn’t exist. Two elections ago, Meta was still called Facebook. No-one had heard of ChatGPT the last time Australia went to the ballot box. 

Everything I see tells me that the 2025 Australian federal election has been the YouTube election. Researching this piece, I realised that the 2007 election was also labelled the YouTube election by some, too. That doesn’t mean it can’t be the YouTube election again now, or in the future. I can’t help but think that with so much unrealised potential, with the trends of technology making video more central to the internet, and the unwavering stability and growth of YouTube, the next election, and maybe the one after that, could all be YouTube elections, too.