• Donald Trump won the election with the help of people like Joe Rogan.
• Rogan is a podcaster, right? Well yes, but he’s also a YouTuber.
• And Rogan is one of many podcasters who enjoy a huge following on YouTube. Trump spent time with many of them.

Podcasts played a major role in Donald Trump’s re-election this week.

RIGHT?

Or maybe it was Twitter. Or TikTok.

It could be all of them. And it could also be that people interested in these media and platforms had reason to want to believe that they were important.

But if you’re looking at the role of the Internet in elections and you’re not talking about YouTube, you’re doing it wrong.

So once again: YouTube is huge – so huge it generated $50 billion in revenue last yearthe majority coming from advertising. Advertisers spend this money because that’s where the eyeballs are.

And certainly, some of those eyes have consumed a lot of political/election content over the past year. Research on the bench claims that 32% of American adults regularly get their news from YouTube – more than any other social media platform except Facebook, at 33%. And I am convinced – based on my unscientific survey of my YouTube-breathing teenage sons – that these numbers are much higher for young people.

What do people watch when they watch politics on YouTube? In some cases, it’s just another version of television: Fox News reportedly attracted as many as 1.1 million concurrent viewers for its live Election Day broadcast on YouTube. This represented about 10% of its conventional television audience, but still remarkable for a very young platform.

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

But what was most interesting about this election was how the Trump campaign spent the summer hosting YouTube personalities. Starting with people you’ve heard of, like Joe Rogan, to people you may have never heard of before this year, like 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 simultaneously. You can listen to his podcasts on Spotify, but you can listen to them – and watch them – on YouTube.

And it happens more often than you think. Edison Research states that YouTube – including 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 interview with Trump in October generated a staggering 47 million views (note: don’t try to compare this to a TV rating, as YouTube would count a “view” as 30 seconds of viewing – and someone who watches for a bit, stops and returns to the same video later in the day will count as a second view). The one he did with JD Vance this month, it now exceeds 15 million. But even a standard Rogan interview can generate 2 million views or more.

And there’s a universe of conservative podcasts, or podcasts that aren’t political but open to conservative guests making big numbers on YouTube, from former Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly to former reality TV star Theo von. Trump visited them all. You can also find clips of their shows on sites like Instagram and TikTok. But they’re focusing their efforts on YouTube, for the same reasons as many creators.

For starters, you can find a large audience there. And YouTube’s algorithmic discovery mechanism allows creators to get in front of audiences who weren’t looking for them.

In contrast, podcast audiences grow slowly, but tend to stick around once they connect with someone they like, says Chris Balfe, CEO of Red seat companiesa company that helps Carlson, Kelly and Bari Weiss of The Free Press sell ads for their shows.

And unlike platforms like Instagram and TikTok, podcasters can get a significant share of the ad revenue generated by their YouTube audience. (There are also liberal/left-wing podcasters/YouTubers, like Crooked Media, the company behind Pod Save America. But there aren’t as many of them, and they don’t have the same kind of reach, as the reporter says. Notes by Taylor Lorenz.)

So should we call these people podcasters? Or YouTubers?

Yes, says Balfe.

“I think it’s the same thing. We should think of it as a podcast plus an election on YouTube,” he says. “Or an election for a creative economy. The most successful talents succeed everywhere.”