Intramedium Interaction and the Third-Person Effect: How Partisans Respond to YouTube Ads and Comments

As digital media technologies have evolved and become more powerful, the prevalence of mixed-media content-that is, content that mixes multiple media such as text and video-has increased considerably. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than YouTube, now the Web's third most trafficked site. YouTube provides for video sharing in an environment otherwise dominated by textual titles, descriptions, and comments. As such, it is an ideal venue in which to examine the impact of intramedium interaction on message evaluation. This study uses a survey experiment to test first-person and third-person evaluations of campaign ads from the Obama and Romney campaigns, and the comments posted about them on YouTube, using two real ads and one set of fake comments. Findings suggest that partisan perceptions of the manipulated ads transfer to the constant comments, and that the contextual cue of the YouTube environment reciprocally impacts partisan evaluation of the ads themselves.