There isn’t a harder question in political media planning right now than how much YouTube to buy.
On one hand, it’s an enormous reach driver and belongs in almost every media plan. On the other hand, there are legitimate questions around efficiency and attention.
Note: we’re talking about YouTube, not YouTube TV. We covered YouTube TV in Impressions to Ballots #16
What’s the bull case for YouTube?
1. Massive Reach Driver
YouTube should be included in almost all political media plans. Full stop.
It’s one of the largest reach platforms available to political advertisers today.
Usage has grown roughly 3% per year since 2018
2. Reach across age groups
70% of adults 55–64 are now reachable on YouTube
54% of adults 65+ are reachable today, up from 32% in 2018
3. Most time spent on the TV screen
YouTube has a deep ecosystem of content that clearly attracts viewers and keeps them engaged.
What is the bear case for YouTube?
1. Targeting limitations
Political advertisers are restricted to:
Age
Gender
Geography
Contextual targeting
Audience targeting is not allowed.
That means campaigns will inevitably waste budget by serving impressions to people who will never vote or who would never vote for their candidate. This lowers the cost efficiency compared to highly targetable environments like CTV.
2. Attention variability
Attention on YouTube varies dramatically.
The platform contains an enormous range of content types, screen environments, and viewer behaviors. That variability leads to significant differences in attention and ad engagement.
In a recent statewide campaign we ran for a month, our YouTube ads were shown across 480K channels. YouTube is long-tail.
Analysis by TVision shows that across all dayparts, viewers pay more active attention to streaming apps than YouTube.
3. Lack of Measurement
YouTube operates as a walled garden. It’s difficult to answer basic questions, such as who was reached across platforms and how often.
Google provides strong in-platform reporting, but it doesn’t reconcile cleanly with streaming or linear.
YouTube can deliver scale, but it is harder to measure who you reached and how effective that spend was compared to more transparent environments.
Where does YouTube Premium fit?
This is something to watch over the next few years. The shift to digital and streaming viewership has given voters more options to pay to avoid ads.
YouTube Premium is Google’s answer to this demand. For $7.99 a month, you can remove most ads; for $13.99, they are all gone.
US subscribers have tripled since 2020. If this growth continues, YouTube’s ad reach will fall even if time spent on the platform continues to climb.
What does this mean for political advertisers?
YouTube is a reach driver. It has to be included in almost all political media plans. It is a massive driver of reach and viewership.
Expect waste. Limited targeting means you will hit voters outside your audience. That’s the tradeoff for scale. Budget accordingly.
Buy and optimize for the data you have. We’ll dive more into this next week.