On Wednesday, Kate Kaye (@KateKaye) over at ClickZ (@ClickZ) profiled the video strategy for Governor Huntsman’s presidential campaign (@JonHuntsman). This fired up a conversation that we have been having for quite a while involving video quality vs. audience. The key quote that stuck out to us involved their strategy on which platform to use as their primary hub for video:

Another differentiator: Huntsman 2012 is using Vimeo as its off-site video hub, rather than linking to its YouTube channel from the campaign site. For Davis, it’s a question of quality. “We do have our ‘Jon-to-camera’ issues videos and ‘About Jon’ video series on YouTube so anybody who is searching for Huntsman there can find them, but Vimeo gives us higher quality video, better customization of the embeddable player, much better viewer statistics, no ads or other videos as distractions, and the site itself is a lot more user friendly,” said Davis. “Overall, Vimeo is more professional and attractive for our video, which is obviously the centerpiece of the digital campaign.”

How do you compare video platforms?  YouTube dominates the online video marketplace with over 490 million users worldwide who consume 2.9 billion hours (326,294 years) of video per month, but other services such as Brightcove and Vimeo have entered the marketplace offering features such as longer form videos and more options for customizing the player.

What is the tradeoff between views and quality/customization when choosing a video platform? We started to dig around both the Vimeo page and the YouTube page for the Huntsman campaign to see what the view counts were for each video. There were a total of 56 videos uploaded to Vimeo and 22 uploaded to YouTube for a total of 57 unique videos.

The combined view count for both channels is 17,321 for an average of 303.88 views/video when both the YouTube count and Vimeo count are combined. In fact, 23 of the 57 (40.35%) videos have less than 100 views.

The most viewed video on the channel is the video titled Week One that appears only on Vimeo and has garnered 2,199 views so far.

Since the first video upload from the Huntsman campaign on June 19th there have been 10 videos uploaded by the rest of the Republican presidential field that have more views than all 57 Huntsman videos combined.

Clearly there are more factors at play (list sizes, web traffic, etc.) than just the video platform, but it is hard to imagine the things that YouTube does well doing anything but helping your view count.

What do you think? Join the conversation.

FULL TRANSPARENCY: Targeted Victory is a vendor for Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaign.