Ameliatory — Data Science for Progressive Communication

We answer the questions campaigns can't afford to guess about.

Which thumbnails drive clicks? Which title patterns boost watch time? Does your video do better at 9am or 9pm? Is that viral hit actually viral, or did someone just buy the views?

Most political communication runs on instinct and anecdote. We run it on data.

Ameliatory builds custom analytics for progressive campaigns, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations — starting with an empirical model of what drives organic reach, and ending with specific, testable recommendations you can hand to your content team on Monday morning.

Our Flagship

PoliYT.com

The only public dataset tracking every YouTube video published by 588 members of Congress and all 50 U.S. governors.

72K+ Videos

1.6B Views

748 Channels

Nightly Updates

PoliYT homepage showing trending political videos and performance stats

PoliYT leaderboard ranking politicians by YouTube performance

Live data: leaderboards, per-politician profiles with dual-channel tracking, and YouTube ad spend detection via Google Ads Transparency Center.

Under the hood: an orchestrated pipeline combining the YouTube Data API, LLM-based content analysis, and structured extraction from external signals — feeding multivariate regression models that isolate the factors driving organic reach and a paid-promotion detector that separates organic from bought performance.

Journalists, researchers, and campaign staff use PoliYT for free. Our clients get the deeper analysis: custom benchmarking, content audits, and the full model output for their own channels and peer sets.

Explore PoliYT →

What the data shows

A few findings from our analysis of 72,000+ political YouTube videos. This is what empirical modeling surfaces that gut instinct misses.

2.4x

Organic view gap

Democratic politicians average 2.4x more organic views per video than Republicans — and it holds across the board, not just the famous names. At the median, it's still 1.7x.

PoliYT dataset, 49,314 organic long-form videos, 442 politicians

Shorts adoption gap

Democrats post 7x more YouTube Shorts per politician than Republicans. 46% of Democratic videos are Shorts vs. under 10% for Republicans. Democratic Shorts average 22,350 views each — higher than their long-form average.

PoliYT dataset, 21,874 Shorts across 638 politicians

62x

Topic advantage

Democratic videos about corruption and ethics average 49,000 organic views vs. 800 for Republicans on the same topic. Courts and judiciary content: 15x gap. There are specific topic areas with enormous, largely untapped organic audience.

PoliYT + Gemini content analysis, 4,100+ classified videos

A custom intelligence pipeline — not a dashboard login and a "good luck."

We build a monitoring and analysis pipeline tailored to your organization. It updates nightly, tracks the channels and creators that matter to you, and turns raw YouTube data into recommendations you can act on.

Nightly monitoring

Track your channels, your opponents', your peer set, and any keywords or creators you care about. New data every morning.

Automated analysis

Every new video gets metadata extraction, thumbnail composition analysis, transcript processing, and multimodal AI video analysis.

Regression modeling

Isolate what's actually driving organic reach in your competitive landscape — length, format, topic, timing, thumbnail choices, and dozens of other factors.

Paid promotion detection

Cross-reference multiple signals to identify bought views, so you know which numbers are real and which were paid for.

Actionable reporting

Specific recommendations: change this, try that, here's what your best-performing peers are doing differently. Not a wall of charts nobody reads.

External data joins

Connect YouTube performance to polling, fundraising, media coverage, or any other dataset. See how platform activity maps to real-world outcomes.

YouTube reaches most American adults. For progressive organizations, it's the largest untapped communications channel — and the least understood. We fix that.

Who we work with

Campaigns figuring out what to post and when
Advocacy organizations trying to break through on crowded platforms
Nonprofits and mission-driven media that need to reach younger audiences where they actually are
Journalists and researchers who need clean data on political communication

About

Ameliatory was founded by Darcy Burner — former Executive Director of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center, where she architected the coalition strategy behind the Affordable Care Act; former CEO of Buttonsmith Inc., which she scaled to $5M+ in revenue serving over a million customers; and a former Group Program Manager at Microsoft. Harvard BA, Computer Science and Economics.