Last week I looked at how Democrats used YouTube to get their debate performances out, so let's take a look how well Republicans are using web video.

Judging from the recent debate videos, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani are using YouTube to their advantage more than their opponents. In fact, the Romney campaign had multiple clips of his performance at last week's debate up within an hour-and-a-half of the debate, speed only matched by Hillary Clinton's web team after the Democratic debate. Giuliani's channel was soon to follow, posting five clips by the next morning.

In contrast, John McCain's official campaign website features his opening statement from the first debate one month ago and his YouTube channel has no debate clips. McCain's channel uses mostly mainstream media clips and recordings from the campaign trail.

Mike Huckabee's channel has no debate clips even though his answers have been some of the most memorable of all three events. In fact, Huckabee recorded answers about faith and politics as well as the sanctity of life in his YouTube channel last month, but did not post his answers about the very same topics from last week's debate -- despite having his faith comments on his official site.

Duncan Hunter has mostly debate clips on his channel, while Tom Tancredo uses many one-on-one recordings from the trail and debate clips.

With freely available content and minimal editing, there's no logistical reason why some campaigns aren't posting debate clips. Next month it will be even easier for campaigns and voters alike to record debates now that YouTube is co-sponsoring a debate with CNN.

However, the Republican who's used web video to greatest effect has been Fred Thompson. His one-take, 38-second response to Michael Moore about Fidel Castro (chomping a cigar) was viewed more than 300,000 times and generated the greatest buzz of his nascent presidential run so far. Thompson's stage presence, acting experience and seasoned web team should make him a deft user of web video.

UPDATE: some Ron Paul supporters were up-in-arms about not mentioning his YouTube channel, which has more than 1 million views on his channel and about 16,000 subscribers, according to YouTube. Ron Paul is certainly the most popular Republican on YouTube, but the post was not about popularity but strategy.

Again adhering to the use of debate clips, Paul's channel has three debate clips, one from each debate. Each is essentially a highlight reel of his responses that run between 8 and 16 minutes -- the kind of length that few but those already devoted to Paul will sit through and watch. Paul's web team was slow like some other campaigns to post the most recent debate performance, which didn't go up on the channel until early this morning. Paul's official videos are mostly him speaking on the campaign trail, and after that there are some mainstream media TV interviews.

It's not so much the Paul campaign that has been successful in using web video so much as it is been Paul's YouTube channel providing an easy way to feed supporters -- something all campaigns should keep in mind.