Barack Obama has passed a landmark in political campaigning by clocking up more than 200m views of his online videos on YouTube.

Obama's YouTube feed, established in September 2006 when he was still just a senator for Illinois, now stands at 204,048,235 views. The scale of viewing underlines the growing importance of video as a political communications tool, as well as Obama's own personal dominance in utilising the form.

With campaigns moving increasingly online, video is now a core element of their thinking at all levels of US politics, from the presidential race down. The medium has the advantage of being popular, highly accessible and easy to share through social networks.

According to a study by the Pew research center, video played a role in informing almost a third of voters about the 2010 mid-term elections. YouTube has experienced exponential growth since the last presidential election in 2008 – the site currently attracts 4bn views a day in total, whereas four years ago daily views were in the hundreds of thousands. Today, 72 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Politicians are never keen to be left off the bandwagon, and over the past four years the site has become the go-to channel for them with almost 600 candidates for US office hosting their own official feeds.