President's channel passes 200m views as the medium – still young last time around – explodes on the 2012 campaign trail

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 millions. 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.

"Campaigns are starting to take more ownership of their presence on YouTube," said Ramya Raghavan, YouTube's news and politics manager. The Obama campaign website directly links to its YouTube channel which it has made the hub of its video output.

The other great advantage is that video allows candidates to run in effect their own media networks in the pursuit of an ambition that has long been the Holy Grail of politicians – bypassing the media. Through YouTube they can skirt around the likes of NBC News or NPR – or the Guardian for that matter – and deliver their message, as they would want it to be delivered, directly to voters.

Take for example the 17-minute documentary The Road We've Traveled put out this year by the Obama re-election campaign. It is narrated by Tom Hanks and directed by Davis Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth.

"Campaigns have always wanted to bypass the media, they just haven't had the technology to do it in the past," said Peter Daou, who led Hillary Clinton's digital operation in her 2008 bid for the presidential nomination. "There is a sense among politicians that campaigns can replace reporters and media outlets."

Daou believes that television and the press still ultimately hold the upper hand – TV and press commentators can provide a filter for understanding political messages that no amount of direct marketing from Obama or Romney HQ can escape. But that doesn't appear to be stopping them from trying.

In the 2012 election cycle, both Mitt Romney's Republican campaign and Obama's have shifted markedly from text to video. They are increasingly attacking each other on screen, and then rapidly rebutting each other also on screen. The online nature of the content allows it to be produced with lightning speed, and it is designed consciously with social media sharing in mind.

Obama began his experimentation with the power of video on 14 September 2006 when he posted a CNN interview with him about federal spending on YouTube. His single most popular video was when he appeared on the Ellen Degeneres show in 2007 and danced on stage to Beyonce; that film gained 12m views, with the main demographic being 13- to 17-year-old girls.

Obama really put video on the map during the 2008 presidential race, pumping out some 2,000 YouTube videos that concentrated on his army of grassroots supporters. He had videographers attend rallies and upload videos of devoted organizers going door to door and telling their personal stories.

"In 2008, the mission of our video program was to tell the story of the movement," said Obama's director of video in 2008, Kate Albright-Hanna. "That meant we actually traveled around the country and spent time with people in their homes. That's very different than just blanketing people with ads or trying to go viral for the sake of going viral."

As Sam Graham Felsen, Obama's chief blogger in 2008, recently put it: "We told a lot of stories, real stories of ordinary people. We didn't want to use fancy graphics and things like that."

This election cycle, the Obama video offering is more focused on issues and more overtly targeted at specific segments of the voting public in the hope that they will be passed around via social media. The most watched video on Obama's YouTube channel so far in 2012 is the launch of African Americans for Obama which has been watched almost 3m times.

The Romney campaign is this year also targeting its video offerings. Days after Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen criticized Ann Romney for not "having worked a day in her life" the Romney campaign released a video biography of Ann titled "Happy Birthday, Mom" that was popular among women aged 45-64.

An indication of the increasing sophistication of the media output of the campaigns this election cycle is the use of infographics. Earlier this year the Obama campaign set up an online data visualization, What 1 Million Looks Like, breaking down donations by time and location.

More recently it produced The Life of Julia, an animated slideshow intended to show how women benefit from Obama's healthcare policies. The feature kicked up a massive protest online from conservatives, adding evidence to the argument that videos and infographics are more likely to get pick-up than a policy statement or press release.

Though Obama towers over Romney in terms of video reach – Romney's YouTube channel has notched up only 14m views – it should not be assumed that Republicans are unsavvy when it comes to the form. "The Republicans have been very strong on YouTube," said Ramya Raghavan, YouTube's news and politics manager.

Local candidates are also using YouTube videos to break away from the pack and cause a national stir.

As part of his congressional bid for a seat representing Texas's 33rd district, Roger Williams starred in an allegorical YouTube video called "The Donkey Whisperer". He accused the donkeys of coming to expect feed hand-outs and told viewers: "These donkeys don't live in the United States of France, they live in the United States of America."

• This article was updated on 25 July to reflect new figures supplied by YouTube.