With all the glitz and glamour, stars and starlets, jokes and jokers, this year's Academy Awards Ceremony has been a feast for viral video. Fans wasted no time jumping head first into the action, copying, commenting, and increasing exposure for all the hottest clips. Craving to see who would come out on top, who would crash and burn, and if winning an Oscar translates to viral video victory, we turned to our Viral Reach Database to discover the hidden and not-so-hidden viral video gems of the year's biggest movie event.
And with that, the envelopes please...
In the category for the most video placements generated for all Oscar clips, the win goes to Slumdog Millionaire! This isn't much of a surprise, considering the imported film's total dominance, snagging eight, count 'em, eight Oscars. Out of the more-than 1,800 clips we analyzed for the Oscars, Slumdog Millionaire accounted for over 30% of them. Heart-throb vampire Robert Pattinson follows with 20%, while High School Musical phenoms "Zanessa" slide into third place with 9%.
Slumdog also dominates the "views" category. With over 11 million total views generated for the Oscars, Slumdog contributed well over 2.2 million of them. Pattinson is once again the runner up, charming close to 1.3 million views. Clips of Heath Ledger's family during his acceptance speech and throughout the night produced nearly 1 million views.
It was a photo finish in the Comments category, though, with Slumdog edging out the victory over Sean Penn by a razor-thin margin of less than 50 comments, with both films threatening to top 5,000 total comments at any moment. The terms "slumdog" and "sean penn" were among the most commented terms of the event overall. Host Hugh Jackman's opening performance with Anne Hathaway also deserves an honorable mention with over 3,000 comments.
Among other noteworthy findings:
Now that we've opened the viral video envelopes, a quick word on the judging methodology. We looked at all the clips involving a particular actor, couple, performance, and film. This means that every clip that's dedicated to vampire Robert Pattinson at the Oscars counts towards his total. Clips with both Pattinson and, let's say, the kids from High School Musical, counts for no one. Compilations of Oscar highlights and predictions also fall into this bucket.
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The data used in this post was collected from our Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.