"Debates give candidates a chance to break loose of YouTube-ification and speak for themselves at length." So wrote New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley in her analysis of yesterday's presidential debate between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the 20th of the primary season.

Well, I don't know if TV debates actually give the candidates a chance to speak for themselves at length, as opposed to giving TV personalities a platform to posture as journalists and try to play "gotcha." But that's not what bugs me about Stanley's assertion. It's her implicit conflation of YouTube with the sound-bitification of political coverage.

Television is scarce media, and for decades the sound-bite has been shrinking. In the 1968 presidential election, the average network soundbite was 42 seconds. By 1988, it had shrunk to 9.8 seconds, according to Daniel Hallin of UCSD, and in 1996, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, to just 7.2 seconds.

But when it comes to online video, the opposite is clearly happening. Here's a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation of how YouTube is expanding the time candidates have to speak for themselves, using Barack Obama's YouTube channel.

All told, Obama's videos have been viewed more than 23 million times in all--and that's not counting partial views, since YouTube only reports a full viewing as a "view." (This number has almost quadrupled since the beginning of the year, by the way.) His campaign has uploaded more than 700 video clips, and adds several more a day.

If you just look at his ten most viewed videos, here are some astonishing facts:
-The average number of views for these top ten is currently almost 690,000, with the top video receiving nearly 1.3 million and the #10 video at about 370,000.
-The average length of these ten videos is 9.75 minutes. That's ten times the length of the average network TV soundbite.
-The total amount of time people have spent watching just Obama's top ten videos is approximately 70 million minutes, which works out to about 1.2 million hours, 46,618 days or 133 years.
-There have been nearly 700,000 views of the longest of Obama's most popular videos, his January 21 speech commemorating Martin Luther King's birthday.

If "YouTubeification" is to mean anything, it should be the vast expansion of time available for all kinds of video content, including political speech. That's because online video is a world of abundance, not scarcity like network TV. YouTube is replacing the 8 second soundbite with the 10 minutes soundblast.

Unfortunately, NYTimes TV critic Alessandra Stanley is actually applying her narrow, TV-trained viewpoint to a completely different world, which is why she misreads what is going on online. When she notes that debates give candidates more time to speak than YouTube, I suspect that she is actually referring to how television covers YouTube, which is that it plays sound-bites of popular YouTube clips--like the "gotcha" moments of one candidate attacking another.

(By the way, the Clinton campaign YouTube metrics are nowhere as impressive as Obama's--which I would argue is more a sign of their failure to understand and embrace the new medium than anything else--but even with Clinton the average length of her top ten most viewed videos is nearly 2.3 minutes.)