And that’s a typical result for OFA videos, even though many of them appear to have been made at great expense. A similarly high-quality piece on Obama’s climate efforts got fewer than 4,000 views in its first month online—again, after being tweeted to a population larger than California, which goes to show that one can build an online community of any size that is completely disengaged. Incredibly, you can have 44 million Twitter followers, yet remain so irrelevant that neither fans nor foes will so much as bother to click your links.

Even if outside measurements of web traffic are somewhat unreliable, Alexa’s web analytics tool suggests that BarackObama.com’s best days are behind it. During election season, the website was briefly among the top 1,000 in America. Immediately afterward, it resumed its status as a dead-end on the information superhighway. As of July 2014, OFA’s site ranked 7,474 in the U.S.—far behind Townhall.com (ranked 1,010), HotAir (1,077), PetSmart (1,180), the official website of Major League Soccer (1,435), the children’s educational site ABCMouse.com (2,497), and the official website of the Department of Justice (3,875).

Yet for all the indicators that it is nothing special anymore, OFA has obviously been something quite real when it mattered most for Obama. Obama’s digital dominance surely helped him win in both 2008 and 2012. His online armies have, at very particular moments in time, proven that they really are out there somewhere and can make a difference.

So how and why do they seem to collapse into virtual non-existence after each election is over?

DISENGAGED VOTERS DISENGAGE

On election night 2012, Mitt Romney’s top advisers were quietly optimistic about their candidate’s chances. Sure there were a slew of polls showing Obama with a comfortable lead. But all of those poll results were built on samples that looked nothing like the electorate Romney’s team expected to turn out. When pollsters used samples that better matched how Republican strategists thought the electorate would look, Romney had a strong chance of winning.

Of course, we now know that the electorate that turned out in November 2012 was nothing like what Republican strategists thought it would be. The Obama campaign had poured millions of dollars into a sophisticated digital voter contact and outreach operation. “The power of this operation stunned Mr. Romney’s aides on election night,” The New York Times reported, “as they saw voters they never even knew existed turn out in places like Osceola County, Fla.”