Our recent discovery that Olympic record-smashing sprinter Usain Bolt blew away all-time gold medal winner Michael Phelps – in terms of online video viewing audience – came as a bit of a shock to us. This result kicked off a whole bunch of ideas about head-to-head viral video comparisons of other Olympics stars.
Was Bolt’s victory a fluke, or do online audiences like an underdog? To help answer this, we decided to focus on a single high profile Olympics competition: women's gymnastics. In particular, we took a look at three of the stars of the US team: team captain (and local area favorite) Alicia Sacramone, born-to-be-there Nastia Liukin, and tough-as-nails Shawn Johnson. Just in cased you missed the excitement, Sacramone had two heart-wrenching falls in the team all-around and then wound up fourth on the vault, Liukin took gold in the individual all-around, and Johnson pulled out a gold in the meet's final event, the balance beam.
So, here we have three great Olympic competitors, each with her own compelling story line. How did they fare in the head-to-head competition for the hearts-and-minds of online video viewers? We did an informal poll and Sacramone was the odds on favorite. The general consensus was that people like watching other people fall (if you don't believe this to be the case, keep your eyes open for our upcoming analysis on Miss USA falling in the Miss Universe pageant).
But, in what could be construed as the Olympics bringing out the best in all of us, Shawn Johnson, the 16-year-old Iowa native, ultimately prevailed, starting out ahead by just over 100,000 views and growing her lead to more than 900,000 by the close. After a strong start, Liukin took silver, and Sacramone's Olympics stumbles didn't translate into viral video stardom... yet!
| August 8, 2008 | August 24, 2008 |
| Sacramone | Liukin | Johnson | Sacramone | Liukin | Johnson |
| Views | 704,243 | 3,059,604 | 3,162,247 | 1,378,648 | 3,370,608 | 4,286,174 |
| Placements | 152 | 239 | 311 | 155 | 241 | 314 |
| Comments | TBD | TBD | TBD | 4,384 | 10,980 | 17,365 |
Source: Visible Measures Viral Reach Database
This data was collected from our Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 95+ million Internet videos from 100+ video-sharing destinations.
Please stay tuned for more Visible Matchups, and drop us a line if you have any head-to-head matchups you’d like to see.