There’s something fishy about Craig Kelly and Clive Palmer’s YouTube views

Craig Kelly’s election advertisements for United Australia Party (UAP) have racked up millions of views on YouTube in a short time. 

Does this mean there are hundreds of thousands of Australians clamouring to watch them, counting down the days until they can put one next to Kelly’s name at the ballot box? Probably not.

In the past month, the UAP’s YouTube channel has posted nine videos that have all got more than 1 million views each. The most popular — “Stop the lockdowns. Together, we can take our country back” — has been seen more than 8.4 million times since being posted on August 30. Other videos take aim at vaccine mandates and the nuclear submarine deal. 

While it’s possible millions of people found Kelly’s ad through YouTube’s algorithm or came via social media, there are signs that these views aren’t organic.

The videos don’t have other features that would accompany a video with millions of views. Take the “Stop the lockdowns” video — it has just 6000 likes and dislikes despite having more than 8 million views. This is very low, and suggests that few people who watched it engaged with it. In comparison, a video by one of Australia’s top YouTubers, LazarBeam, called “Youtubes Most Viewed Videos” has been viewed just over 4 million times since last week. It has more than 240,000 likes and dislikes, despite having half the views of the Kelly ad.

The UAP has only 30,000 subscribers, too — just a fraction of the total views — which means this large audience came through other means. But it doesn’t appear that this audience came through traditional social media channels. Analysis using social media tool CrowdTangle for the “Stop the lockdowns” video shows it has only 2000 engagements across Facebook and Twitter — nothing to suggest it has gone viral.

Zooming out, there are further inconsistencies in the channel itself, according to YouTube analysis tool Social Blade. If a channel was suddenly going viral because it was picked up by the platform’s algorithm — its recommendation engine recommending viewers to watch the advertisement, for example —  you would expect the number of video views to be fairly consistent. 

But the UAP’s views are inconsistent. On September 27, the channel’s videos were viewed 1.8 million times. The next day? Essentially none (the tool shows a negative number, which is a quirk of the imprecise counting model). This isn’t consistent with a video organically gaining views either through social media or through YouTube’s recommendation engine. 

So where did these views come from? It appears as though they have been paid for.

Google’s political transparency report shows that the UAP has spent $878,250 since November 2020 — more than two-thirds of the total amount spent by all political advertisers during that time.

This entire spend has been promoting the UAP’s YouTube videos as pre-roll videos. YouTube allows advertisers to pay to play an advertisement before showing a user’s elected video. YouTube counts a view if a user watches the video for at least 30 seconds. According to the transparency report, Kelly and Palmer have paid for at least 18 million views. It also counts views, not users. If one person has seen the ad 100 times, they count as 100 views.

Looking at the view counts of Kelly’s and Palmer’s videos is a little misleading. It’s clear that these are not people who are actively seeking out vaccine misinformation in the form of an election ad. Many may have ignored the ad. 

However, it shouldn’t be underestimated how important awareness is to electoral success. After all, knowing someone exists is the first step towards voting for them.