Visible Measures Blog

By now it is no secret that that Kanye West has a penchant for interrupting live broadcast shows. His most recent outburst came over the weekend at MTV's 2009 Music Video Awards, when Kanye jumped on stage to interrupt Taylor Swift's Best Female Video acceptance speech and, uh, express his support for Beyonce's Single Ladies video. Speculation has swirled that the entire episode was staged, though by the looks of it Taylor Swift must have missed the memo:

 Given that this was not Mr. West's first impromptu show-stopper, we here at Visible Measures couldn't resist looking through the lens of Internet video measurement to see how this latest controversy stacks up against Kanye's previous 'greatest hits'. Within 24 hours of the event, Kanye's improvised commentary was the talk of the tabloids and had racked up well over 600,000 views -- even with proactive copyright enforcement from the folks at MTV/Viacom. This reveals that, when it comes to viral video controversy, Kanye West's biggest competition is Kanye West.

As the chart indicates, this week's VMA interruption has already garnered more attention than Kanye's 2005 pre-Grammy interview in which he threatened to "have a real problem" if his record Late Registration didn't win Album Of The Year. At the current pace the Taylor Swift incident will likely surpass the 1.4 million views of his brazen antics in 2006 at the MTV Europe Music Awards. However, during 2005 Hurricane Katrina fundraiser concert, he left Mike Myers and many others speechless with his extemporaneous statement that "George Bush doesn't care about black people", clips of which have subsequently been viewed nearly 6 million times.

So, while Kanye West can be an polarizing figure in pop culture, his antics have attracted a sizable amount of viral video attention. At this rate, we're left to wonder what will happen the next time he appears on live TV. 

Source: Visible Measures

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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.

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