YouTube is expanding its popular YouChoose platform to Senators, Congressman, and state candidates. To apply for a "Politician" account, you can download the application here (PDF).

Features for a "Politician" account include:

• Official designation as a "Politician" channel.
• Enhanced design and branding capabilities, including a personalized banner advertisement to be
displayed across the top of the channel that links back to a home website.
• Extended video upload capability (extended length uploads, and up to 300 MB per video file).

To receive an account, you have to meet several pieces of criteria that you can find on the application.

I asked YouTube News & Politics editor Steve Grove about expanding the YouChoose platform and he said, "We're expanding our You Choose '08 platform beyond the presidential race to include Senate and House races - we want candidates down the ballot to reach out to voters in the same way that the candidates at the top of the ballot do. In today's political environment, you can't not have a YouTube channel."

How true. The political world has shifted.

TechRepublican is pleased to welcome Ron Paul's communications director, Jesse Benton, to the discussion. We have a standing invitation to all GOP campaigns to participate in this forum.

The Ron Paul Campaign loves YouTube! Why? Just look at the numbers.

We have over 2.5 million channel views and our videos are generally watched 100,000 times in just a few days. More importantly, our channel has nearly 23,000 subscribers, more than double those of Barack Obama (9,000) and nine times greater than the second place Republican, Mitt Romney (2,600). In just four months, we have become the 35th most subscribed channel of all time, in any category.

At the risk of receiving a resounding “no-duh” from TechRepublican readers, I think that streaming online video is the most exciting and meaningful development in recent politics. Online videos allow a candidate to bypass the mainstream media, extend the conventional 30 second sound bite, and spread their message in a very powerful way. YouTube has emerged as the dominant format and, given Google’s penchant for innovation, is likely to stay on top.

For Ron Paul’s feature this week on YouChoose 2008, the campaign wanted to do something special. We produced a series of seven short videos to air in sequence, with a new posting every day. Many people have been introduced to Ron though his conservative opposition to the Iraq war, so we saw this as an opportunity to address other issues, like freedom driven health care reform, abolishing the IRS and defending Second Amendment rights. Seven days, seven issues, seven videos.

Ultimately, I think a candidate’s success on YouTube will be determined by their number of channel subscriptions. A highly subscribed channel could evolve into a de facto personal broadcast TV station, where tens, even hundreds of thousand of voters receive regular video communications directly from the candidate. This communication is very personal, highly effective and has a high propensity to go viral. The possibilities are staggering.

Our campaign’s feature week for YouChoose 2008 represents our first step towards this vision. Other than the need for some more production bells and whistles and perhaps some on-camera television training for the host (yours truly), I think we’ve made a solid effort. We look forward to hearing feedback, both positive and negative, and hope all who enjoy will subscribe.