YouTube Democratic Presidential Debate Airs On CNN

Jul 24, 2007 at 7:20am ET by Greg Sterling

It’s quite clear that then Internet and now online video have changed political marketing. Whether they have changed the nature of political discourse is another thing entirely. Indeed, people will be discussing whether last night’s YouTube-CNN Democratic presidential debate was a watershed moment for American politics or simply a novel mechanism to deliver questions “from the audience.” Yet the questions – although many were to be expected given the issues — and the way they were presented were unique and, many will agree, refreshing.

It’s also the case that this debate and the related videos and commentary will have a long afterlife that political debates have not had historically. Archiving of these questions and responses will allow millions of people who didn’t tune in to watch CNN to see the video. We’ve entered the era of “debates on demand.” I would also imagine that, given Google’s Universal Search and Ask 3D, we’ll start to see candidate debate clips and political videos appearing in search results over time. So when somebody searches on “Hilary Clinton, health care” there will likely be video (news content or produced video) in those search results.

Here are the questions on YouTube and the candidate responses, as well as YouTube community video responses. The most celebrated question of the evening (about global warming) was delivered by a snowman.

Here is the NY Times’ Katharine Q. Seelye’s blow-by-blow chronicle (with embedded video) of the debate with her editorial commentary.

A Republican version of the format is scheduled for broadcast on September 17. You can submit questions here.

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and writes a personal blog Screenwerk, examining the broader world of media and advertising. He also posts at a Local Mobile Search, which is focused on the mobile Internet.

See more articles by Greg Sterling >

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Silver, July 24th, 2007 at 9:08 am ET:

A short while ago, the NBC’s The Today Show had an interview with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

Today’s Matt Lauer asked them if they’d be planning to add advertising to the site, since some estimates state that YouTube could be making something on the order of a billion dollars a year if they did, and the two answered that they’d always planned to have ads on there, that there already was some advertising on the site, and that they were dedicated to the user-experience so they didn’t want to do anything that would detract from that too much.

Josh G, July 24th, 2007 at 1:30 pm ET:

I think the public opinion on this was weak at best. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that it’s not hard to choose the exact same questions that would have otherwise been discussed from the huge pool of submissions.

feedthebot, August 7th, 2007 at 2:36 pm ET:

Hey, just a reminder that there is a Google gadget for the CNN/Youtube debates…
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&url=http://cnnyoutube.googlepages.com/cnnyt.xml

YouTube Democratic Presidential Debate Airs On CNN

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