{"id":847354,"date":"2025-05-10T23:12:51","date_gmt":"2025-05-11T04:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/10\/2025-is-australias-youtube-election\/"},"modified":"2025-05-10T23:12:51","modified_gmt":"2025-05-11T04:12:51","slug":"2025-is-australias-youtube-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/10\/2025-is-australias-youtube-election\/","title":{"rendered":"2025 is Australia\u2019s \u2018YouTube election\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On the eve of the final week of the 2025 election campaign, Labor\u2019s national secretary Paul Erickson warned the party\u2019s supporters in an email that they were \u201centering the most dangerous period of the campaign\u201d.<\/p>\n

Erickson was asking for half a million in donations to help in a \u201chigh-stakes digital auction\u201d \u2014\u00a0specifically, 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Since the 2000s, elections have often been associated with an ascendant, influential technology that played a significant role in the contest: from the 2007<\/a> Google election to 2022\u2019s TikTok<\/a> election.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The 2025 Australian federal election\u2019s platform du jour<\/em> has gotten less attention because it\u2019s not a new thing. In fact, it predates most of its competitors (it\u2019s 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\u2019s hard to comprehend and easy to miss.\u00a0YouTube didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

Australians watch more YouTube than anything else online<\/h2>\n

YouTube has been a digital juggernaut for decades. It had already reached two billion daily views by its 5th birthday<\/a> in 2010, and then had one billion users five years later<\/a>. Having turned 20 just two weeks ago, YouTube has been a presence for so long, in fact, that it\u2019s easy to miss how it has continued to grow in size and influence.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a lot.<\/p>\n

YouTube is the second most visited website after Google, according<\/a> 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Naturally, political parties, groups and candidates want to go where the voters are \u2014\u00a0and this has been reflected in their growing reliance on YouTube this election.\u00a0<\/p>\n

More money spent on YouTube election ads than ever before<\/h2>\n

This election has marked a new high in YouTube electoral advertising. Last election, Google reported roughly $11.5 million of advertising on its platforms\u00a0during 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.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

And out of all of the places that Google serves ads \u2014 meaning YouTube, Google search ads and individual website ads placed by Google \u2014 political advertisers are leaning even more heavily on YouTube: in 2022\u2019s election, 86% of the ads were on YouTube. In 2025, it\u2019s been 96%.<\/p>\n

Much like Meta<\/a> or many of the streaming platforms<\/a>, Google gives advertisers an incredible ability to micro-target specific voters using a variety of categories<\/a>: 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<\/a>. 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\u2019 users they\u2019re being shown to, but beyond that, the public has little idea about how these election ads are targeted.<\/p>\n

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Founder of Australian digital advertising monitoring firm Adgile, Shaun Lohman, says he\u2019s seen a drastic increase in sophistication in how political parties are using YouTube\u2019s advertising since the last campaign.<\/p>\n

He says Australia\u2019s 2022 election YouTube advertisements followed UK politics\u2019 approach, where television ads were reused on YouTube to try to reach people who weren\u2019t watching TV. This year, Lohman said, Australian parties, groups and candidates are following the US approach.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat 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,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s another big category of content: organic content, or, in layman\u2019s terms, the stuff that you post for free instead of paying to show. What\u2019s incredible is just how many different forms of content are captured on YouTube.\u00a0<\/p>\n

YouTube has grown from where videos end up to where they start<\/h2>\n

You know how your perception of someone is often frozen in time from the moment you met them? For some people \u2014 occasionally myself \u2014 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\u2019s changes to consumption habits, have transformed it into something greater than that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Every time a new format has come along, YouTube has swallowed it. Podcasts? They\u2019re on YouTube now, too, and much more discoverable, thanks to the platform\u2019s 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<\/em>\u2019s David Pierce summed it up in a title: \u2018YouTube is everything and everything is YouTube<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

YouTube has served many purposes in elections. It\u2019s for election ads that people can share with their friends and networks. It\u2019s for clips of traditional television broadcasts: highlights and lowlights in Parliaments, gotcha moments in interviews.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Let\u2019s take one of the most high-profile moments of the election cycle: the leaders debates. The ABC\u2019s 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 \u2014 your FriendlyJordies, Juice Medias, Avi Yeminis, etc \u2014\u00a0make their own, original content in reaction. Finally, some of those moments were run as election ads by the campaigns. It\u2019s nose-to-tail content consumption, all home on YouTube.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Politics\u2019 Konrad Benjamin, has grown a significant YouTube following<\/a>, even though many people would have mostly seen him on other platforms.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The rare chance to spend a long time with someone<\/h2>\n

One of the most tantalising benefits of YouTube is that it\u2019s 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 \u2014\u00a0something that politicians are able to tap into by appearing on their channels.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s most popular YouTube accounts, Ozzy Man Reviews.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cAussie Prime Minister Anthony Albanese discusses global issues at the pub<\/a>\u201d is a pretty big departure from his usual content.<\/p>\n

From what we can tell from the outside, it appears to have been a big hit for the prime minister\u2019s 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: \u201cThis 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,\u201d reads one of the top comments.<\/p>\n

Swinburne University\u2019s chair of media and communications, Professor Dan Golding, said that appearances like Albanese\u2019s on Ozzy Man Reviews or Peter Dutton on businessman Mark Bouris\u2019 channel (twice during the campaign!) are \u201csignificant\u201d. He explained that there\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWith this massive audience that\u2019s invisible to a lot of people, this is where a lot of people are going to get some of their exposure to political content,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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(A momentary digression here: digital metrics are very difficult to compare because, counterintuitively, they are not universal<\/a>. 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\u2019s 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.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to be upfront and say that my gut\u00a0\u2014 based on what we know officially and my intuition from watching the dynamics of internet culture \u2014\u00a0tells 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

On Valentine\u2019s Day this year, Albanese posted a video across social media platforms showing him, dressed in a polo, chinos and sneakers, sitting next to his fianc\u00e9e\u00a0Jodie Haydon and their dog Toto. The pair were prompted with questions about their relationship that they answered simultaneously, such as \u201cwho reached out first\u201d or \u201cwho dresses the best\u201d. 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\u2019s video platform in the 2010s (but has spread across the internet). It\u2019s the 2025 version of the glossy magazine profile or softball television interviews of the past \u2014 except it all happens on the campaign\u2019s terms and on YouTube.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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