The wait is finally over. Viral video superstar Susan Boyle made her second performance on Britain's Got Talent in the semi-final round of the competition Sunday night. She performed "Memory" from the musical Cats in front of a background dripping with celestial and angelic imagery (those producers must have been reading all those comments!). If you haven't seen it yet, it's worth a look, if just to see her makeover.
As regular readers of this blog already expect, we've been busy tracking this much-anticipated performance with our Viral Reach Database. So far, Susan Boyle's semi-final performance has inspired over 700 placements (!!) in aggregate since Sunday, which have generated more than 16.8 million views and 30,000+ comments. In any 'normal' context, these results would be literally off of the charts. But, as has already been well-established, anything relating to Susan Boyle isn't exactly 'normal.'
So how do the initial viral video performance figures for Susan Boyle's semi-final performance stack up to the numbers for her groundbreaking original?
Well, at this point in its viral life cycle, the original performance had produced over 200 placements, 19+ million views, and 65,000+ comments. This means that Susan Boyle's second performance achieved nearly 90% of the opening results of the original, which was the fastest growing online video in history. Wow! That's nothing short of remarkable.
We're now forced to wonder if this new performance will follow a similar growth pattern as the original, which at the moment stands at more than 235.5 million views total. Will viewership of her semi-final song take off from here? Or, has the "unbelievable" quality that marked her original performance naturally faded due to her new-found stardom? Ultimately, does Susan Boyle still mesmerize online audiences?
As we have said many times in the past, only time will tell. And, as always, we here at Visible Measures will continue monitoring how audiences respond to this performance and keep you updated as the results come in. Stay tuned!
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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.