GovFeeds Now Covers Local Government YouTube: What Governments Post, and What Gets Watched
GovFeeds now includes the official YouTube channels of cities, towns and counties, searchable next to the Facebook, Instagram and X posts already in the app. Here is what governments put on YouTube, and how many people actually watch.
- Meetings dominate. About 45% of all uploads are recordings of council, commission and board meetings. They draw about 13% of all views.
- Most videos get modest views. The typical video has 83 views and 1 like. One in ten passes 505 views; one in a hundred passes about 4,300.
- A few break out. About one video in 200 has passed 10,000 views, and the top 1% of videos account for 71% of all views.
- Short videos have the higher ceiling. 11% of videos under a minute reach 1,000 views, against 3% of meeting recordings.
- Public safety leads. Public safety videos have the highest typical view count of any topic (173), and police, fire and EMS videos beat their own channel’s usual in 11 of the 15 states where we could measure it.
In this piece: Why YouTube · What governments post · How many people watch · Meetings vs. short videos · What beats a channel’s usual · Nine videos worth a look · YouTube in GovFeeds · How we measured
Why YouTube
Video is where local government posts earn the most attention. In our study of 708,415 Facebook posts, video drew about three times the engagement of everything else. For many governments, YouTube is where that video lives: the meeting archive, the police department’s series, the parks promo that also runs on Facebook. Leaving it out meant missing a large part of what peers make.
What local governments put on YouTube
Every video gets a topic label from the same set of topic labels GovFeeds uses for Facebook posts, assigned from its title and description. One topic dwarfs the rest. Half of all uploads are government information and board business, and about four in five of those are recordings of meetings: council sessions, planning commissions, school and zoning boards, budget hearings. For many governments YouTube is first of all a public record.
Past the meetings, the mix looks like a government’s Facebook feed: public safety, events, road and building projects, parks, the library. Public safety stands out on views. The typical police, fire or EMS video has 173 views, twice the overall typical video. Animal services is a small topic, only 172 videos from 64 governments, but its typical video has 108 views, second among topics.
How many people watch
Most local government videos get modest views, and that is worth saying plainly. The typical video has 83 views. A quarter have 35 or fewer. One in ten passes 505, and one in a hundred passes about 4,300.
A few videos break out. About one in 200 has passed 10,000 views, and the most-viewed has about 870,000. Those few carry most of the audience: the top 1% of videos account for 71% of all views. One caution about the very top: several of the most-viewed videos are 15- and 30-second versions of the same spot, which is how paid YouTube ads are cut. We cannot see whether a government paid to promote a video, so treat the biggest numbers as possible advertising rather than proof of a format.
Likes and comments are rarer. The typical video has 1 like, and 45% of videos that show a like count have none. 87% of videos with comments turned on have none. Even among videos with 1,000 or more views, the typical one earns about 7 likes per 1,000 views. On YouTube, views are the signal to watch.
Meetings set the floor, short videos set the ceiling
Meeting recordings are not ignored. The typical one has 86 views, about the same as everything else, which makes sense: residents and reporters who need a specific meeting go and find it. What meetings rarely do is travel. Short videos are the opposite.
| Kind of video | Share of uploads | Typical views | Reach 1,000+ views |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meeting recordings | 46% | 86 | 2.8% |
| Under a minute | 13% | 96 | 11.1% |
| 1 to 10 minutes | 27% | 83 | 6.2% |
| Over 10 minutes, not a meeting | 13% | 76 | 4.9% |
Videos under a minute are 13% of uploads, but 11% of them reach 1,000 views, four times the rate for meeting recordings. Videos over ten minutes that are not meetings, such as documentaries, ride-alongs and livestreamed events, sit in between.
The clearest example in our data comes from the City of Greenville, TX. After each council meeting it posts the full recording and, beside it, a recap of three to eight minutes. The full meetings from July through September drew between 20 and 57 views each. The recaps drew between 319 and 9,539. We cannot see where those views come from (a recap shared in a newsletter or promoted as an ad counts the same), but every recap drew more views than the meeting it covers.
Which videos beat their own channel’s usual
Raw view counts favor big cities with big channels. To compare fairly, we measured each video against its own channel’s typical video (the median), using channels with at least ten videos. Looking only at videos that are not meeting recordings, a few kinds of video beat their channel’s usual more often than not.
| Kind of video (not meetings) | Governments | Typical video vs channel’s usual | Share above the channel’s usual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recruiting and hiring | 48 | 1.45× | 62% |
| Messages from the mayor or manager | 84 | 1.16× | 57% |
| Police, fire and EMS | 220 | 1.15× | 55% |
| Project and construction updates | 144 | 1.02× | 51% |
| Event promos and recaps | 225 | 1.00× | 47% |
| Animal shelter and pets | 57 | 1.00× | 46% |
| Meeting recaps and highlights | 97 | 0.92× | 44% |
| How-to videos and explainers | 90 | 0.89× | 45% |
| Staff spotlights and ride-alongs | 102 | 0.79× | 39% |
Three patterns hold up. The typical police, fire or EMS video beats its channel’s usual, and it does so in 11 of the 15 states with at least ten such videos. Messages from the mayor or city manager do better than a channel’s usual, perhaps because they are rare and personal. Recruiting videos do best of all, though there are few of them, so treat that as a lead rather than a rule.
Some popular kinds of video land at or below the channel’s usual: staff spotlights and ride-alongs, how-to videos, and meeting recaps as a group. That does not make them a bad idea. The examples below include a ride-along, a how-to and a recap that each did many times better than their channel’s usual. It means the format alone does not carry a video. Execution does, and that is what you can learn from peers who got it right.
Nine videos worth a look
These come from nine governments in nine states, across a range of topics. Each did several times better than its own channel’s typical video, and each is a format another government could adapt. Tap a video to play it here; it loads from YouTube’s privacy-enhanced player only when you do. View counts are as of October 11, 2026.
What these share is easy to copy: one subject, a real person or animal on camera, and a reason for a resident to care this week. Most are under two minutes. The two long ones, Sacramento’s ride-along and Clayton’s documentary, are built like shows, with a story and a title that promises one.
How to use YouTube in GovFeeds
YouTube videos now sit alongside Facebook, Instagram and X posts everywhere in the app.
- Dashboard: set the Platform filter to YouTube to see what governments like yours are uploading.
- Keyword search: search video titles and descriptions the same way you search posts, for example “ride along,” “council recap” or “hiring.”
- Your feed: YouTube videos appear in your personal feed alongside posts from the other platforms.
- GovFeeds AI: when you ask what peers are posting about a topic, the answer now draws on their YouTube videos too.
- Borrow it: on a video that worked for a peer, Borrow it drafts a plan for your own YouTube video.
- Monthly reports: client reports now include YouTube for governments that have a channel.
“We are living for these benchmark reports!”
Communications Director, Municipal Government, Texas
Team plans start at $80 a month for five users, under most purchasing-card limits, so there is usually no procurement process. Checkout is the signup: you are in the app about two minutes later.
How we measured
Data: public videos from the local government YouTube channels in GovFeeds, with views, likes and comments as of October 11, 2026. Topics are the same GovFeeds topic labels used for Facebook posts, assigned from each video’s title and description. A meeting recording is a video whose title names a meeting, council, commission, board, hearing, workshop, committee or similar body and that runs at least ten minutes. Length comparisons leave out scheduled and live streams. Like and comment figures leave out videos where the count is hidden or comments are off. A channel’s usual is the median views across that channel’s videos; the comparison uses channels with at least ten videos and excludes meeting recordings, and kinds of video were identified by words in the title. View counts accumulate over time, but the median for videos at least 30 days old (84 views) is close to the overall median (83). Several of the most-viewed videos look like paid ad spots; we cannot tell paid from organic views.
Frequently asked questions
Which local government YouTube channels does GovFeeds include?
The official channels of cities, towns and counties, including department channels such as police, fire, library and parks. Coverage starts with the states where GovFeeds subscribers are and keeps growing.
How many views does a typical local government YouTube video get?
Not many. The median video in our data has 83 views. One in ten passes 505 views and one in a hundred passes about 4,300. Likes are scarcer still: the median video has 1 like and most have no comments.
What do local governments post on YouTube?
Mostly meetings. About 45% of uploads are recordings of council, commission and board meetings, and the broader government-information topic is 51% of all videos. After that come public safety (8%), events (8%), infrastructure and planning (7%), parks and recreation (5%) and library and education (4%).
See what peer governments post on YouTube.
GovFeeds collects videos and posts from thousands of local governments so you can see what residents watch and respond to, borrow the ideas that fit, and make your own version.
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