Imagine: U.S. Sen. Susan Collins looks into the video camera and, in great detail, describes not her energy plan, not her health care plan, but the topping of her homemade blueberry buckle.

Or how about footage of U.S. Rep. Tom Allen poking fun at himself for being described as boring? Wouldn't those be clips worth watching?

They're available.

Maine's U.S. Senate candidates Allen, a Democrat, and Collins, a Republican, have smashed state fundraising records, raising more than $10 million combined for the 2008 race. Despite being awash with money, both campaigns are incorporating free video-sharing Web sites, such as YouTube, to help connect their candidates to Maine voters.

"When pennies are counted and fundraisers are gone to night after night and month after month in order to purchase television, this basically free medium of Internet television is only going to get bigger and bigger," said Lance Dutson, Collins' top Internet consultant and owner of a Maine-based Web design firm. "These are vastly less expensive (than television ads)."

Both candidates' campaigns have uploaded more than 50 videos each, of varying degrees of seriousness, onto YouTube, a video-sharing Web site created in 2005 and purchased by Google Inc. in 2006.

Campaign officials on both sides agree YouTube videos allow for greater creativity and depth when promoting their candidates. For both candidates, viewership so far has been limited for most videos, ranging from single digits to as much as 2,000.

Dutson said the Collins' camp has two basic models for its YouTube videos.

"One is the campaign trail stuff, you know, the daily life stuff and speeches and things like that," he said. "The other is a long-format, issue-oriented video that runs for five or six minutes, instead of 30 seconds or 90 seconds."

The Allen campaign has taken a different approach toward its postings. In addition to uploading Allen's appearances on television news programs and his television ads, his campaign has used testimonial videos to attract voters.

"What we did was took a lot of the major issues in the election - the environment, energy, the Iraq war - and we just went out and talked to Maine people about what they're thinking," said Isaiah Oliver, who works in Allen's communications office, and films, edits and posts the campaign videos. "The way I see it, it's good to get the voice of the people and Mainers and hear what they're saying, instead of just having Tom say everything all the time."

Allen has also received a YouTube boost from his party's national infrastructure. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has posted seven videos, some featuring a sarcastic tone, promoting Allen on the video-sharing site.

Both campaigns said the videos give Mainers from across the state who are unable or uninterested in attending an actual event with their candidate the chance to get to know them in a way that television ads don't.

"It's the reality of the campaign trail that we're trying to show," said Dutson. "The more hands off (we are) and the more we just let it fly, the better the product is when we put it out there and the easier it is for voters to connect to."

YouTube has also played a role in the presidential campaigns of U.S. Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama. Seven months ago, a video of musician Will.i.am featuring celebrities and clips from an Obama speech was put up on YouTube and now it has nearly 10 million views. In August, a YouTube posting of McCain's ad depicting Obama as a vapid celebrity garnered nearly 500,000 views and Paris Hilton's response video got more than 300,000 views.

The Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan "fact-tank" based in Washington, D.C., released a report last week that analyzed the McCain and Obama campaigns' presence online. It said McCain's official YouTube channel, as of August, had fewer than a quarter as many videos as Obama's, and the Obama channel also had about five times as many subscribers.

Since the McCain campaign posted its "celebrity" video, the number of new subscribers and videos watched on the McCain YouTube channel has grown at a higher rate than the Obama channel, according to the Pew report. McCain has also seen a significant increase in the polls since August.

But drawing a line between YouTube popularity and a candidate's polling numbers is far from an exact science.

"People recognize the role that the Internet and YouTube play ... but it's hard to measure results," said Hannah August, spokeswoman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "We've seen some buzz on the Internet about (the Allen videos) and you can watch the YouTube views rack up, which is always fun. It's something that keeps the conversation going on a different level, and in that sense it's measurable."

Allen trails Collins by 19 points, according to the most recent statewide poll of likely voters.