Let's call it the YouTube election

• Donald Trump won the election with the help of personalities like Joe Rogan.
• Rogan is a podcaster, right? Well, yes, but he's also a YouTuber.

Podcasts played a huge role in getting Donald Trump re-elected this week.

Right?

Or maybe it was Twitter. Or TikTok.

Could be all of them. And it could also be that people interested in those mediums and platforms have reasons to want to believe they were important.

But if you're going to look at the way the internet played a role in the election and you're not talking about YouTube, you're doing it wrong.

So, once again: YouTube is massive — so massive it generated $50 billion in revenue over the last year, with the majority of that coming from advertising. Advertisers are spending that money because that's where the eyeballs are.

And certainly, some of those eyeballs consumed a lot of political/election content over the last year. Pew Research says 32% of American adults regularly get their news from YouTube — more than any other social media platform except for Facebook, at 33%. And I'm very confident — based on my non-scientific poll of my teenage sons, who inhale YouTube — that those numbers are way, way bigger for young people.

What do people who watch political stuff watch on YouTube? In some cases, it's just another version of TV: Fox News reportedly drew as many as 1.1 million concurrent viewers for its election-day livestream on YouTube. That was about 10% of its conventional TV audience, but still notable for a platform that skews very young.

Overall, YouTube viewers consumed 67 million hours of live streams on Election Day, per Streams Charts.

But what was most interesting about the election was the way the Trump campaign spent the summer embracing YouTube personalities. Starting with people you've heard of, like Joe Rogan, down to ones you may have never heard of before this year, like the Nelk Boys.

Wait a minute! I can hear you saying. Isn't Joe Rogan a podcaster?

Absolutely. But Rogan, like many other creators/influencers/personalities, creates content that lives on multiple platforms at the same time. You can listen to his podcasts on Spotify, but you can listen to them — and watch them — on YouTube.

And that happens way more often than you might think. Edison Research says YouTube — including both regular, free YouTube and YouTube's paid YouTube Music service — is the most popular way for people to listen to (or watch) podcasts.

You can see it in some of the numbers. Rogan's October interview with Trump has drawn a staggering 47 million views (note: Don't try comparing this to a TV rating, since YouTube reportedly counts a "view" as 30 seconds of watching — and someone who watches for a bit, stops and comes back to the same video later in the day, will count as a second view). The one he did with JD Vance this month is now above 15 million. But even a standard-issue Rogan interview can generate 2 million views or more.

And there is a universe of conservative podcasts, or podcasts that aren't political but are open to conservative guests that do big numbers on YouTube, from former Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly to former reality TV star Theo Von. Trump visited all of them. You can also find bits of their shows on places like Instagram and TikTok. But they focus their efforts on YouTube, for the reasons many creators do.

For starters, you can find a big audience there. And YouTube's algorithmic discovery mechanism means creators can get themselves in front of audiences that weren't looking for them.

Podcast audiences, by contrast, grow slowly — but tend to stick around once they connect with someone they like, says Chris Balfe, CEO of Red Seat Ventures, a company that helps the likes of Carlson, Kelly and The Free Press' Bari Weiss sell ads for their shows.

And, unlike platforms like Instagram and TikTok — podcasters can get a meaningful share of the advertising revenue generated by their YouTube audiences. (There are also liberal/left podcasters/YouTubers, like Crooked Media, the company behind Pod Save America. But there aren't nearly as many of them, and they don't have the same kind of reach, as journalist Taylor Lorenz notes.)

So should we be calling these folks podcasters? Or YouTubers?

Yes, says Balfe.

"I think they're the same thing. We should think about it as a podcast plus a YouTube election," he says. "Or a creator economy election. The best-performing talents do well everywhere."

Correction: November 11, 2024 — Streams Charts is the name of the company that tallied Election Day YouTube live-stream viewing, not Stream Charts.