Now that both Republican and Democratic conventions have come roaring to a close, the smattering of buttons and hats thankfully back in closets, the passionate delegates back to their everyday lives, and the candidates back to their stump speeches, the viral video numbers are in.
Team Obama / Biden cultivated more than 3.7 million viral video votes for their acceptance speeches whereas McCain / Palin have so far received close to 2.4 million. The viral video power of the tickets was inverted, however. Where Obama drew the vast majority of the views for his ticket (more than 3.3 million), McCain shot down his own. Palin, with a bulldog of an effort, snatched up just under 2 million views. McCain came crawling in with little more than 400,000 votes, five thousand less than Biden. Ouch.
Does anyone else find these results surprising given the Nielsen ratings that showed 38.5 million television viewers for McCain's speech, 500,000 more than Obama's?
In terms of the overall conventions, the 2008 DNC field trounced the RNC in viral video views with 7.8 million, 73% of the total viral viewing, across 278 distinct video placements. The Republicans trailed far behind with less than 3 million views in aggregate across an almost identical 265 unique video placements.
[Note: based on feedback from several sources, we issued a follow-up post that provides additional detail on these findings.]
Interestingly, the Dems came up short when measured by total comment count, 37,934 to 39,160. Sarah Palin single-handedly carried the Republican field across the viral video comment count finish line, ratcheting up more than 29,000 on her own. The numbers reflect the general sentiment that adding Governor Palin to the Republican ticket really shook up the race.
President Bush was as equally absent from the online scene as he was at the actual Republican convention. In a vote that required no recounts or judges, our two-term president picked up less than 6,500 viral video views. Even former presidential-runner up (barely!) and Inventor-of-the-Internet Al Gore prospered with more than 80,000 viral video views, while wind-surfer Senator John Kerry snagged 144,000.
Check in for our weekly updates and analysis on the viral video presidential race. And, as always, drop us a line if you’d like us to feature your videos in one of our Visible Matchups.
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We measured the speeches of the following political heavyweights for our viral video convention coverage:
- Democrats: Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy.
- Republicans: John McCain, Cindy McCain, Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, Joe Lieberman, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, George Bush, and Laura Bush.
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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 95+ million Internet videos from 100+ video-sharing destinations
.