For many, voting is a pretty big deal and every four years U.S. citizens who are of age are able to vote to decide who will be the next President. While there are lots of people who don’t vote, those that do have the opportunity to affect the country with real change as the next head of office will determine how this country changes in the future. Voting can have a huge impact, and people will start to see various groups and media outlets informing them of the importance of getting out there and voting. This year, YouTube is doing its part again to encourage people of all legal voting ages to get out there and “vote in real life.”
To do this, YouTube has gathered the help from numerous popular creators on the platform including Bethany Mota, Hannah Hart, Kingsley, Hank Green, Philip DeFranco and more, and have put together a short little video called #voteIRL – Use Your Voice. Vote In Real Life. The video is about a minute and twelve seconds long and is simply a mashup of different creators explaining why voting is important and how those votes can collectively make a difference. YouTube’s main goal with this video as the name of it suggests is to get people to the polls, vote, and make a change in real life even if they’re following the election online, which many people are doing.
According to YouTube, since the July convention there have been about 200,000 election videos uploaded to YouTube every day with a collective total of 110 million hours watched of videos related to the presidential candidates and issues they represent. Naturally, with seeing how much people have been engaged in the election online, this inspired YouTube to get people to share their voice in real life. In addition to the “get out the vote” campaign video which you can view below, YouTube states that they have also partnered up with various people and groups like AwesomenessTV, Machinima, Maker Studios, and Fullscreen to make videos that are one minute and thirty-four seconds long (exactly how long it takes to register to vote) that could be on just about anything. They could be normal videos that are actually related to the content those channels normally produce, but in them they will also be encouraging people to register to vote and get to the polls come election time. Voter registration day is September 27th, and YouTube mentions that users should look out for these special voter reminder videos on that day, with the videos popping up on the watch page, the search results page, and the homepage.