Visible Measures Blog

Traditionally, the phrase is: Beware the Ides of March. But December is turning out to be an equally dangerous time for politicians. Almost exactly one year ago, US President George Bush was attacked by a pair of flying shoes in Iraq. On Sunday night in Milan, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was attacked by a flying souvenir of the city's cathedral. Mr. Bush ducked. Unfortunately, Mr. Berlusconi didn't even see his attack coming.

The Milan Incident

Videos of the incident have spread quickly across the Web. Just a few hours after the incident occurred, 300 clips had spread online. The number of clips doubled by Monday morning, and today there are more than 900 videos.

These videos have already generated over 6 million views and 30,000+ comments. By way of comparison, Bush's shoe-dodging had garnered 10.7+ million views and 90,000+ comments in the same timeframe.

However, when compared to Berlusconi's gaffe in 2008 calling then President-elect Barack Obama "young, handsome, and tanned," the Milan incident has generated nearly 6x the number of views.

While unfortunate, is this the Italian version of Bush vs. Shoes? Should politicians start staying inside in December? 

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The data used in this post was collected from Visible Measure's Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 200+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.