The DNC wrapped up last night with President Obama giving the final speech of the convention. Throughout the convention, there was a wide variety of speakers, from Hollywood stars, to mayors, to students, to candidates, to ex presidents. We wanted to see which ones created the most buzz online and drove the most video views.
To do this, we used our True Reach methodology, which combines the performance of video clips related to an event, from the original event, to copies of the event, to mixes, mashups, parodies, satires, commentaries, and more. This provides us with a holistic view of true performance of video online.
So, which democratic speaker has won the votes of online audiences?
Michelle Obama is the clear winner. With over 2.5 million views, the First Lady tops Bill Clinton's speech by a whopping 1 million views. Her speech has inspired over 60 video clips across the web, from snippets highlighting certain lines of the speech to the complete version running 25 minutes.
To put the First Lady's performance into perspective, at this exact point one week ago, the combined views of the top ten republican speakers was 2.1 million.
Barack Obama's speech has driven just over 308,000 views so far this morning. While this is significantly less than the First Lady's and Bill Clinton's speeches, the president's speech has been live for less than 12 hours (many of the clips for his speech were uploaded between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM this morning). At this point one week ago, at the same moment in its video lifecycle, Mitt Romney's speech at the RNC had driven 35,000 views. To date, Romney's speech has driven 336,000 views.
Julian Castro, the first Latino keynote speaker ever at the DNC, is the surprise breakout star of the convention. Coming only behind Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton in viewership online, the San Antonio mayor has produced over 460,000 views to date with his historic speech. This time last week, Paul Ryan's RNC speech, the second most-watched of the republican convention, had generated 407,000 views.
What does all this mean? It's hard to say at this point beyond Michelle Obama seems to have stolen the show at the DNC and Julian Castro is a rising star in the democratic party. The president's numbers will definitely rise today and throughout the weekend. We'll post a follow-up report comparing the two conventions to see who, ultimately, won the votes of online video viewers.
Stay tuned...
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Update: As of 5:00 PM, President Obama's speech has surpassed 600,000 views.
