Betsy Schiffman over at Wired's Epicenter blog wrote a great piece titled "Did More People Tune Into McCain's Speech Than Obama's? Perhaps Not." that references our recently published viral video matchup between the 2008 DNC and the RNC. Very cool!
Not all that surprisingly, the comments have started flying... and one in particular, posted under the username Burns Best, has caught our attention. And no, it wasn't because he or she called us 'Obamabots' (despite our best efforts to remain impartial when presenting our results!), but because Burns Best correctly pointed out one of the many challenges in comparing viral video assets: the time difference.
The central issue is that the 2008 Democratic National Convention started on August 25, while the 2008 Republican National Convention started a week later on September 1, and even then didn't really get rolling until September 2 due to Hurricane Gustav. So the DNC videos have been available for a week longer than the RNC videos, and hence have had more time to accumulate views. So was our prior analysis really a fair fight? Burns Best certainly didn't think so, and did some creative back-of-the-envelope calculations and drew some different conclusions based on the data we published.
Honestly, we think it's great that our data has invited some scrutiny from folks who care about the results. But we take questions about our data collection and our research methodology seriously, and we wanted to provide some additional data from our Viral Reach Database in order to further illuminate our prior findings. Here's what we did:
- We pulled daily incremental view counts for both the DNC and the RNC videos.
- We then 'offset' the view counts to reflect not the actual date the views were recorded, but the number of days after each convention had begun.
- We then charted the results in efforts to get a true apples-to-apples comparison. Below is the result.
The x-axis is the number of days after each convention opened. You'll notice that by Wednesday (day 3), the viral video views of the DNC were already ramping up, while the RNC's online viewing kicked in later due to their shortened scheduled. Sarah Palin spoke on Thursday night (day 4), so the RNC viral views spike significantly on Friday (day 5).
Of the just under 10 million total views that the two conventions received through day 9, the DNC captured 68% while the RNC came in at 32%. This split is different from our prior breakdown, but the overall story remains the same: the day-by-day incremental view counts show that the viral views of the 2008 DNC online videos substantively outpaced those of the 2008 RNC.
So, thanks Betsy Schiffman for the post and to everyone who has weighed in on the Wired.com piece... and a special thanks to Burns Best for inspiring us to drill a little deeper and share these results publicly. We're publishing these results to highlight some of the compelling findings that are possible by measuring the True Reach™ of viral video content.
We at Visible Measures have a mountain of viral video data that's 95+ million videos large and growing. We're having fun sharing some of our findings here in our blog and are looking forward to publishing new findings on a regular basis. And if you're interested in seeing how your brand stacks up online, please drop us a line!
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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.