I’ll admit I laughed when she sat down to the webcam for her YouTube Spotlight video asking for help chosing a campaign song. But Hillary Clinton’s viral strategy works. Humor (a proxy for humanity), entertainment, and mixing it up with the real people made her videos a hit.

And I rolled my eyes every time I saw Ron Paul popping up everywhere. But judging by the traffic figures below, his strategy — make lots of videos, have your people make lots of videos, and put them everywhere — is also working.

The invaluable TechPresident, working with TubeMogul, shows the results for both strategies (go to the site for fully interactive graphics). First, here are the stats for the Democrats’ YouTube videos, showing Clinton surging past Obama for the first time:

Here are stats specific to YouTube’s Spotlight feature:

And here’s the picture from the Republican side, showing Ron Paul’s hockey stick (note also Giuliani’s clueless performance):

A few lessons from this:
* Watch out: The candidates are all going to try to show their funny side.
* They’d be wise to mash voters’ videos with their own.
* Make lots of video. Candidates should be putting up a video of the day so we know to come back and see what they’re up to.