November 20, 2008

The Young Turks Illustrate Progressives’ Web Video Dominance

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My piece out today on frustrated internet activists in the Republican Party begins with a story from Michael Turk, a conservative activist who ran the eCampaign division at the RNC after the 2004 presidential election. In short, the RNC killed an exciting opportunity for web video just as it began to get some coverage because it badly misunderstood the conventions of the genre. (See the piece for more detail.) That episode presaged the current state of affairs. Four years later, Barack Obama used and is using web video as one of many technological tools to reach out to hundreds of thousands of his supporters, while John McCain had a lackluster YouTube channel and generated little excitement around his web operations.

But it isn’t just Obama who is capitalizing on the power of web video. It’s the left more generally. Consider The Young Turks. A radio show originally on Air America and now on XM satellite radio, The Young Turks has been broadcasting on the web since the pre-YouTube era. Now that it operates a YouTube channel, it is absolutely killing the game. Just this week the channel passed 50 million views, with 32.4 million views coming in a period that maps with the election cycle (January to October 2008). By comparison, the John McCain YouTube channel has just 25.7 million views in its lifetime.

A progressive satellite radio show did better traffic online than the Republican presidential candidate. The Republican activists that I spoke with have a seriously uphill battle.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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