While the election is officially over, the fun lives on in the realm of viral video. President-elect Barack Obama’s speech has been making the rounds throughout the viral video world at lightning speed. And, as has been covered in TechCrunch, the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD, NewTeeVee, and TV Week, we’ve been closely monitoring the viral video growth of this historic speech and have uncovered some big numbers describing the rate of growth of the speech's video placements and overall audience.
First, in honor of possibly our last opportunity to compare an Obama speech directly to a Senator John McCain speech, we tapped our Viral Reach Database to look at the total number of placements – every video related to their speeches – and viral video views for McCain’s gracious concession speech versus Obama’s victory speech.
The results of this comparison are not all that surprising – after all, we American's love a winner.
Obama’s speech has seen more than 7 million views spawning from 500 placements in less than 48 hours, whereas McCain’s speech collected over 1 million views from more than 180 placements.
This is still an impressive result for McCain, as his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention has so far collected just over 750,000 views from 90 placements (while's Palin’s RNC speech drew 2.6 million views).
The viral video view growth of Obama’s victory speech has been gathering momentum since yesterday morning. Our discovery process revealed that the speech had seen more than 620,000 views from 100 placements by 11:00 am ET yesterday. By 5:30 pm, the view count had shot up to more than 2.2 million from 160 different placements. At the 11:30PM ET, almost exactly 24 hours after the speech occurred, the number of placements had grown to 200, generating close to 5 million views.
When we looked again this morning at 9:30 am, the view count had ballooned to more than 6.8 million while the placements had skyrocketed to more than 500. It's been fascinating to monitor this viral video phemenon develop in real-time. At this stages in the speech's viral video lifecycle, the question is not if these numbers will continue to rise, but how high will they go?
We’ve thoroughly enjoyed reporting on the election over the past couple months. From the conventions, to the debates, to the hilarious skits on Saturday Night Live, the election has provided a wealth of viral video topics to analyze. And while we're partly sad to see the election come to a close -- ok, not really! -- it seems apparent that the medium of viral video has benefited greatly from this election. For that, we give thanks.
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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 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.
